Thanks zep & fruitjar! Yes, the printing window would pop up and the hour glass would stay on until the print job finished. I could only print one job at a time and sit and do nothing until the printing stopped. I did download SP3 [what a horror that was] a couple of months ago and had to get MS support to uninstall it all. That might have started the problem. Ofcourse, I always have non-essential programs running at the same time! I went to the HP site and got online support. It took a while to figure it out but it was resolved by going to Control Panel, Printers, R Click the printer icon, properties, advanced tab and changing selection from "print directly to printer" to "Spool print documents so program finishes faster". Yayyyy! I can again walk & chew gum at the same time! I can send more than one print job and keep on working. I NEVER changed that setting but I'm wondering if SP3 did. It is the root of all evil. Thanks~ I never occurred to me to go to the darn HP site.

How do you get yourself into these problems? Because you have a problem and are trying to fix it rather than ignore it or dump your problem on someone else. I find that to be very admirable. The good thing about this is you will be learning a lot in the process of getting things back on track. The down side is it is going to take a little bit of time if we do it here. Your are very lucky because there is a lot of experience her and, super people willing to help. There should be no fear of what to do with what fix-it finds if you decide to go that route. They offer several bits of information as to what found information does, and a suggestion of what you should let fix-it do, to fix your computer. You can undo anything fix-it does, with the click of a button. If you go to do anything that will screw things up, fix-it will tell you. If anything in any of the steps does not agree with what you see on the screen, don't continue and get back to us and let us know what the discrepancy is. There are several reasons why you might not be getting to the desk top you are used to and rather than a bunch of mumbo jumbo and jargon, we'll start with the simplest reason first. From what I gather at this point, you have multiple issues that are not necessarily "Computer Problems". To best help you get on track using a forum like this, I suggest we take one issue at a time. There are several ways to skin a cat so I am going to use what I know will get you to where you want to be. Of course, if you know a faster way that works for you, no problem, as long as we both get to where we want to be. We don't know what you know so if we describe a step that you well know, it is not to insult your intelligence or belittle you, it's just to get you where you need to be in a step by step manner. 1....The folder that YOU created named "desk top", rename it to "My Icons" and do so without the start and end quotes. The folder you created, from what you indicated here, has a space between the words "desk" and "top". That's the one you want to rename. 2....Click on the START button at the bottom left of you computer screen. Look for "My Computer" and click on that. 3....RIGHT click Local Drive (C:) In the left column at the top, you should see "Desktop" with no space between desk and top. Looking down a little further, you should see C: with a plus next to it. Click on that plus. When it expands, look down the list and you should see the renamed directory "My Icons" that you did previously. Click on that and in the right column, everything you moved should be listed there. 4....At the top of this window click on EDIT and when the menu drops down, click on SELECT ALL. Everything in the right column should become highlighted, usually in blue. 5....Take your mouse pointer over to the highlighted column click down on the LEFT mouse button and HOLD IT DOWN. While holding it down, drag everything over to the left column and up to the "DESKTOP", at the top of the left column. You will see the DESKTOP change color when you are on it and at that point, let up on the mouse button. Make sure you are on the DESKTOP name and that it highlights because if you don't, you may move everything into another directory, compounding the issue!!! Everything should now be back the way it was before you moved your desk top. If everything is back to what you are used to, we'll take the next step. My particular next step is going to ask for a list of everything in the task manager under the tab "PROCESSES". Do a "Ctrl" "Alt" "Delete". When the task manager pops up, click on the "Processes" tab. After you enter this tab, hover your pointer over the words "User Name". This will be the name of one of the columns. You have to hover over the actual words. Left click that and you will see everything organize itself. If you could then get us a list as it appears on your screen, we can work on the next steps. I have to go on an errand so it might be some time before I get back to you, I live in a rural area. Someone else here may pick up where I left off, I have no problem with that. The beauty of this particular forum is many knowledgeable people willing to help.

Connect the computer directly to the modem and see if the issue goes away. If it does then you can conclude it's a router issue. If that does not work then you would consider reinstalling the wireless driver form device manager. You also might consider following the procedure as outlined below: Copy and paste the text between the stars into Notepad. ******************************************** @Echo on pushd\windows\system32\drivers\etc attrib -h -s -r hosts echo 127.0.0.1 localhost>HOSTS attrib +r +h +s hosts popd ipconfig /release ipconfig /renew ipconfig /flushdns netsh winsock reset all netsh int ip reset all shutdown -r -t 1 del %0[/code] *************************************************** Save as flush.bat to your desktop. Double-click flush.bat file to run it. Your computer will reboot. Note: For Windows Vista or Windows 7, right-click flush.bat and select "Run as Administrator". See if that helps.

@ aputernut Was that a stream-of-consciousness moment ? There's like about a 100 words there, with no punctuation, no sentence capitalization, nothing . . . How are we supposed to parse something like that ? lol Btw, the way that link was made, it only goes to ehow.com . I did take a look though . . . as you probably know, ehow.com is by no means a tech site. They have people employed to dream up things to write "how-to" articles about, a lot of it being almost copy & paste. They may be correct on some points, but it's hardly a definitive or authoritative site for tech info.