>>Thanks for reminding me - it was accidentally (kids) installed on my machine, and I've just uninstalled it now. One of those... for me, Real is a dead format. If anyone is publishing sound or images in non-standard formats (meaning mp3, mpeg), that's their problem that I can't get them.

>LOL! My daughter is the one who installed Real Player on my development machine. I also do audio recording on this machine and burn CD's. Kids are a joy! I was careful to tell our kids to not touch my development machine. Such is life! :)

The accident (of getting the beast installed) happened while the girls' machine was braindead, so we were back to one box.

What happened was a thunderstorm, and some induction somewhere rendered the motherboard dead. Luckily, the death was only clinical, a brief CMOS heart-attack cured it, but it took me a couple of weeks to remember the trick. It's been about ten years since I last had to look for those pins, and I was quite surprised to see they're still there :). I thought this would be obsolete by now - I thought that any motherboard would recognize the values being out of whack and would load the default settings. Maybe in another ten years...