I also have a horde of Vinca growing happily in the side yard under a large Norway maple. I've removed tons in other parts of the yard to make gardens, mostly via digging and smothering. Digging is hard, smothering is relatively easy. First I scalp it by mowing it down as low as possible, then smother with cardboard topped with layers of organic material (i.e. lasagne gardening or sheet composting). Be sure to overlap the cardboard well or it will grow through. This does indeed kill the Vinca and as the layers decompose it will create a nice rich bed for planting. In defense of Vinca minor, it can be useful in a hard to grow and contained location, and it's attractive. But in my experience it is very aggressive and will choke out pretty much everything except for mature established shrubs and trees, native or not. I also had 5 large Norway maples, but have had 4 of them removed (1 huge one left). Even for a maple, they are particularly difficult to grow underneath, as they cast a dense shade, and have mildly allelopathic roots that will suck all the moisture out of the ground. Some natives that will grow in dry shady or open woodland include White wood aster (Symphyotrichum divaricatum), Blue wood aster (S. cordifolium), White snakeroot (Ageratina altissimum), Woodland sunflower (Helianthus divaricatus), Northern sea oats (Chasmanthium latifolium), Viola, and possibly native Columbine (Aquilegia canadensis). I'm sure there are others. You should conider moving the Juglans nigra as they have very allelopathic roots and are difficult to grow under. They also eventually grow into very large trees with wood that is quite valuable.

Nora R. I am having major restoration done on my mother's doll (Probably made around 1900). She sounds much like your great-grandma's doll. It's costing $700, including clothes. At first, I decided against it, but the restoration place allowed me to put half down and pay a little each month. They said it would take several months for the restoration, so, by the time she is finished, I should have it all paid for. It is not worth it to anyone but me. Still, I am not sorry. My son is marrying next summer, and when grandchildren come, perhaps someone beside myself will care. Wings, I have my old Terry Lee and Jerry Lee. My Dad (that's right, my Dad, not my Mom) made most of Terry Lee's clothes! And she still has the red nail polish I put on her when my best friend and I played with our dollies so many years ago.

Mike and Raven, Thanks for the suggestions. I tried everything and just got more frustrated. I was about to call a traveling guru to come to my house and pick up the PC, but I decided to wait because today my DSL provider was sending a tech to update my modem so I can try faster DSL for 3 months, and then decide if I want to do the upgrade and pay for it. Well, the very nice young man who brought the new modem fiddled with my PC for 5 minutes and got the keyboard working again. I don't really understand what he did, but I am certain he is a genius. As for my laptop, it often goes for 6 months without being turned on and then, when I do turn it on it needs hours to update everything available. It doesn't imediately recognize my home network, but if I wait for the prompts it makes me choose which network I want. So, I am choosing my network each time I boot up, but at least it works. My sweet little laptop is AOK and my Kindle works fine so I am quite satisfied. Nancy

many pc companies put a separate partition on the drive and label it D, it contains everything that came on the pc when you got it and that is what you use should you need to reformat, they do that now instead of giving you the actual cd's to be able to go back to the factory setup. In system restore settings you can tell it which drives to set restore points for. to find out if you have sp3 you should be able to go to start> add remove programs, make sure show updates is checked at the top and then look down the list for the windows update service pack3, also you can right click on My computer choose properties then on the General tab it will tell you what you have. There in that same area if you click on the system restore tab you can see which drives it is monitoring, for example mine has C and D and both are showing as being monitored as it should be.