It's hard to diagnose long-distance, but you could have a case of Miscanthus Blight, which is a fungal rust disease becoming more and more common to Miscanthus sinensis. Here's a reply I posted to another forum back in January: There are numerous citations from the internet, and from Rick Darke's book suggesting a standard treatment with copper and/or sulphur based fungicides may control Miscanthus Blight. Banrot is a wide-spectrum fungicide suggested by Darke. Trim off diseased foliage as soon as it appears. Take care to keep the plant clean of dead foliage, especially in fall, and clean up all foliage litter aroung the plant. Use foliar fungicide sprays and soil soaks before the typical onset of the fungus.

I don't see a problem with that up-date (KB890830) just installed it and a few others for Windows 7. All is well.

I use linux also my fave distro is Mepis (dual boot with Ubuntu) but with any MS OS comes IE and with IE comes the patches so as long as it is MS OS it will have IE and therefore needs the patches. Does not really matter if we use firefox and thunderbird as I also do since IE is part of the OS. I too love linux.

I know when I was shopping for a computer in Jan. the best prices and biggest hard drives were for 64 bit. It seemed you got more for your money going 64-bit. After checking, I found out that the software I use for work would not work with 64 bit systems. I needed my computers to work well together and didn't want to chance mixing 32 bit with 64. I later learned from a couple of people who bought 64 and couldn't get some of their software to work and continued using their old computers for certain things. At first it was blamed on Vista, but later determined it had to do with 64 bit. My guess is that people who are good with computers can work through these problems and get their machines to run smoothly, but for the average computer person, it is too difficult. I guess it is the wave of the future, but I don't think the software people are spending a lot of time on it. Also, there are some hardware issues with printers and scanners. You need to check carefully before updating. Personally, I don't want computers which give me a hassle. I bought two new machines last year with XP. I want machines to 'just work.' Jane