Many thanks Zep: I unchecked "Clear history when FF closes" and that seems to have fixed it. I had looked under Options before I wrote, but thought I had always had the "Clear history..." choice selected. Apparently not, although how it was changed I don't know - I'm the only computer user in the house. - June

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.

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

Damccoy,Firefox didn't go back to normal after I disabled & reopened. It said I needed to update which I attempted to do. Got a bunch of notices to update other stuff. Page is hung up now with Java saying critical update needed. I didn't have Java. I was going to uninstall FF but can't do that because it needs to be closed in order to uninstall & page is hung on the Java thing. My security warned that something being offered (not Java) was phishing scam & I got rid of that. I guess my question now is how to uninstall firefox? rose