Unfortunately my sudden refusal to shutdown, seems to be quite regular. I click "Turn Off From the Start Menu" We get to the windows is now (closing)shutting down screen, the jingle plays...and we are not on nor off. Its Microsoft limbo hell. Mouse control has shut down. Can I delete .Net Framework 2.2 without hell to pay? My gut feeling is my problems are stemming from .net or the Merc board. The Merc board once shut down my Morrowind game and cancelled the tilde key assignment. Even Bethesda Softworks said there was nothing I could do. Ideazon support told me to upgrade my all keyboard drivers to hid, and that (unknowingly) knocked out the PS2 keyboard drivers used by the laser mouse assignments...it wasn't until I redownloaded the laser mouse drivers, did everything start to work. I can now cheat on my game to my hearts' content. (The tilde key brings up a game console where dirty little cheaters, like me, can enter codes to cheat.) This driver install and uninstall freeze with this crappy keyboard, that I'm stuck with to save money, is going to break me. It might have caused some problems. I had to reboot my computer from the default settings in bios. Although there was a warning on the Microsoft update site about one of .net updates rendering some computers unresponsive? Well! gee. I CANNOT DO A SYSTEM RESTORE! I tried a few different restore points...and honest to Pete!...I got this message saying the system hadn't changed so they weren't going to bother, there wasn't any point!? I mean, I never!!! What the????

Genes, no, I don't use hibernation or sleep or stand by. Let me run this thought through y'all. About the time the computer decided it didn't want to do internet, we had Comcast to come out to check why we got nothing but tiles. While he was here, he took note that we have five TV's and was using several splitters. He unhooked/uninstalled one of the tvs and it got rid of the tiles. Could the splitters have anything to do with this problem? What is such a riddle to me is, why does one computer work on the Ethernet and the other one will not? Hmmmmmm? I've had another AT&T technician back to the house and he found nothing and I took it back to the computer guy and they, again, found nothing. The AT&T guy did suggest hooking up a router and using that. What's the general thought on that idea?

Here is the listing from whocrashed. I see that it refers to avast antivirus. When I initially tried to install my new IE* I believe that I had disabled Avast for 10 minutes. But I admit that I have forgotten to disingage it in all of my other actions. I will send this and perhaps I will have time to use your routine above to try uninstalling ie8 again with avast disabled and get back again. If I had any sense, I would have tried system restore. I haven't really done that much with this computer and it likely would have done the trick in the first place. System Information (local) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- computer name: I4000 windows version: Windows XP Service Pack 3, 5.1, build: 2600 windows dir: C:\WINDOWS CPU: GenuineIntel Mobile Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 - M CPU 2.00GHz Intel586, level: 15 1 logical processors, active mask: 1 RAM: 1073143808 total VM: 2147352576, free: 2027573248 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Crash Dump Analysis -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Crash dump directory: C:\WINDOWS\Minidump Crash dumps are enabled on your computer. On Wed 8/29/2012 1:32:48 AM GMT your computer crashed crash dump file: C:\WINDOWS\Minidump\Mini082812-05.dmp This was probably caused by the following module: aswsp.sys (aswSP+0x18654) Bugcheck code: 0xC2 (0x40, 0x0, 0xFFFFFFFF80000000, 0x0) Error: BAD_POOL_CALLER file path: C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\aswsp.sys product: avast! Antivirus company: AVAST Software description: avast! self protection module Bug check description: This indicates that the current thread is making a bad pool request. This appears to be a typical software driver bug and is not likely to be caused by a hardware problem. A third party driver was identified as the probable root cause of this system error. It is suggested you look for an update for the following driver: aswsp.sys (avast! self protection module, AVAST Software). Google query: aswsp.sys AVAST Software BAD_POOL_CALLER

As expected, trouble. On the first attempt to update the BIOS the computer froze-up, no display updates (clock continued to show the start time) or response to keyboard or mouse, including keyboard on the notebook itself. The installation seems to have done the checks on the new and old BIOS, but froze when it started to "flash" the BIOS. I called Toshiba TS, I'll give them a passing grade as it took only about 5 minutes of voice prompted filtering to get to a person, who had to transfer me to a specialist on the BIOS update. After some discussion of the situation he told me to hold the power button down for 10 seconds (it takes about 5 second) so that the computer would reboot. The computer did reboot with the old BIOS. He said try again, and after dinner I did. This time there were some error messages on the screen, but the process continued forward with blow-by-blow reporting to me on the installation dialog box. When all done the new BIOS was as wanted (F2 pushed during boot to get to BIOS setup) and I hit F9 to set defaults and F10 to save changes - as instructed by Toshiba. All seems well, for now. Related, how can I see what version of BIOS is being used without going through a reboot and F2 trigger? I thought that information was available on the device manager or on the properties of my computer. I couldn't find the BIOS version using those facilities. I have Windows 7 Home Premium.