I found a group of three autoexec files, and a REM exists to remove the norton, etc, but there are so many other things there, whose names mean nothing to me.... I am so overwhelmed by what I know nothing about as I look at these things, I think I may just make matters worse. Right now, even though my printer, and floppy drive, and serial port do not function, at least I can still go online. I think that I have come to the inescapeable conclusion, that I will not be able to correct this problem. I must now try to learn how to use the HP CD burner so that I may retrieve all of my photos stored in the system. After that, the rest of the machine can go into total melt down. I'd like to reformat the hard drive and put in a newer operating system. Maybe XP would be a better way to go. Again, many thanks for the assistance.