Hi Bruce,

>You did the fresh SE install without the McAfee on the machine at all? That fouled my SE install up a couple times, disabling it doesn't work, because it starts up again on a Win Restart, and may cause trouble.

I formatted the hd and then installed everything. McAfee wasn't installed until after a few other apps. If anything it might have affected my ability to install epson's usb drivers. For some reason epson's setup wasn't automatically expanding it's files (i.e. setup32.dl_ to setup32.dll).


>WinME (Millenium, the natural 9x upgrade) is due out pretty soon, too, and may be better suited to home use (and much cheaper). I'm going to make that move at home. I've had periodic slowness and hanging ever since I installed 98SE - I've reinstalled everything more than once, too. I really should have stayed with 98 1st edition, no doubt about it, everything was working fine.

I don't think I'd want to stay with the same flaky kernel based on the 9x engine (or whatever it's called). 95B worked great for me, and if it wasn't because NT4 doesn't support USB ports I would've gone for that. I don't find the 2000 upgrade price to steep, and when you consider $130 against having to spend another two days reinstalling the damn thing, it's cheap.

>Anyway, I have improved things considerably by using Netscape 4.7 instead of IE5. I've had periodic DLL errors along with slowness and hangs, almost always related somehow to IE, that have disappeared since using NS. So, you might try Netscape if you're not now using it, it *might* help, anyway...

In my machine I haven't had too many problems, but sometimes IE takes about 15 seconds to even manifest itself, and so does word 95 and excel 95 (I'm not a fan of upgrading an app that works well).

Thanks for your input!

Alex