the very best way is to do exactly what you are doing and ask, that way you can get replies from those who have tried it and like it also if there were any problems or glitches, you can also check other support forums for problems listed with a specific update. I do that prior to doing any of my windows updates, I check the forums for comments and if there are problems I wait till I know they have been resolved. As far as IE8 goes there are some conflict problems with certain programs which is why it is a very good idea to read up on it and if you are running those programs be prepared prior to install. I go to google and google IE8 Conflicts and find a wealth of info. Since every system is different there never is a guarantee that any one program will work the same way it does on any other system, so we do have to take chances sometimes and just dive in with fingers crossed.

Well, the computer has been running very slowly, and I've tried about everything else and the only program I've had any problems with has been IE8. I've stopped using IE8 and have been using FireFox, but in my infinite wisdom I decided to try to get rid of IE8 on this computer since I've been using it until the other one is running properly. Only it wasn't real bright to mess with the only computer that was running fairly well. Lesson learned! I tried reinstalling IE8 and got a message that said it didn't load properly. I even tried to uninstall it again, but still got the same error message.

Dropbox is a good way to do that.

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