hello, the machine is only 3 years old,yes i did destroy all the data on it after i formatted.i still have the larger drive but it won't read it. last night a neighbor gave me a windows 2000 disc and i formatted the drive again and it worked;it saw the full capacity of the drive and is ready to use, however when i try to bring the second drive with 225 + gigs of data on it it will not see it no matter how i switch things around bios won't read it, so i took it out, the drive i have working is set to master and is the only drive in the pc but bios says it is a secondary slave drive but it is on the primary ide channel and set to master!!everything in bios is set to auto detect drives,but as soon as i connect the other drive as a slave drive and reboot, the computer freezes and gets stuck on the post screen and hangs.funny thing is when i take that drive and put it in the hard drive enclosure that converts regular drives to use with usb and plug it into the computer i am on right now and reboot, windows comes up and says : found new hardware,mass storage usb device,your hardware is installed and ready to use,it even gives me a new drive letter,shows the drive as a western digital drive but... when i click on the drive letter it says please insert a disk into drive j....hmmm

Zep, thank you for helping. Just before I read your last post I went to the Adobe forum and other people were having the same problems tonight. Someone had already posted links using a 32 bit download so I tried that and it worked and the regular Shockwave Plug in showed up on my plug in page as enabled. I don't know what 32 bit or 64 bit means or even if I need the 64 bit but I will see if this works. You helped me a few years ago with a computer problem I had so thank you again. Anne

camp56, damccoy,ravencajun, and stargazzer, Thank you for the quick responses. Below are my answers to the questions you have asked. The browser is IE8. The version I downloaded yesterday was Adobe Flash Player 10 ActiveX. I uninstalled it, and downloaded and installed it again. Using START> Control Panel>Programs and Features I confirmed what I re-downloaded was Adobe Flash Player 10 ActiveX. The system I have is 32 bit. After downloading and installation, I still could not see any animation. I went to the sites that ravencajun suggested, went on YouTube too, saw nothing but the same dreadful messages " You don't have current Adobe Flash Player", or "cannot find Adobe Flash Player". I have not try Safe Mode yet. Will it help? How can I get to it? Thank you again for the help.

You'll probably find this article interesting, too, Snidely. https://isc.sans.edu/ Personally...I'm still not having any problems updating either Flash or Java with FF. In Jane's case...I think the problem came when she uninstalled Adobe and the lot. None of them will download an updated program onto an XP system anymore. It's just too iffy for them. They don't want the blame if something goes wrong because the XP system can't update itself to what they consider a safe position. Perhaps Win 7.1 will reach that point, too...but so far so good. I don't use either program for personal virual development but I have two VIP sites that demand them. Until those sites upgrade to another tool...I have no choice but to stay with Flash and Java. Adobe is going through an entirely new "attitude" with their programs. Installing AIR is almost a necessity these days as they're using it as a vehicle for their programs. And, sadly, they've removed themselves from the user assistance venue. We're on our own...for the most part now. So it's a tip-toe exercise through the mine fields these days. *** Edited out original link due to problems at the link site. Go to ISC and read today's lead article.