All I can tell you Carol is what I personally would do, everyone has their own opinions. I personally would not purchase the Shields Deluxe it has bad ratings and a bad reputation on many of the pro sites as well as by McAfee site advisor. I would actually be scared of what is might be phoning home and sending out from my computer. There are so many good free programs available or if you want to pay for one so that it is fully automatic there are good ones for that too. In fact that Superantispyware you just got has an option to purchase the full version which will have it run automatically and get the updates automatically so you do not have to remember to do it manually. What program do you have on your computer for anti-virus? That is something you must have and there are some very good ones free such as AVG and Avast! Let us know and if you need a good anti-virus program we can fix you up. this is one I highly suggest everyone should have on their computers no matter what else they have, it will not interfere with any of your other programs. Spywareblaster I will add the link for it. Here is what to do with it. When the program opens you will see on the left a button that says updates click on that then click on check for updates, you must be connected to the internet, it will find any updates and install them. Once it is done with that you will click on Protection button on the left, then click on enable all protection, the shield should now turn green showing you are protected. You MUST remember to once a week double click on the spywareblaster icon that will now be showing on your desktop and do this process to get all the new updates and enable them, it will not do it automatically. Just open it hit the update button, get the updates, then enable all protection. Should you want to pay the small price they ask you can get it to do everything automatically also. Definitely get spywareblaster! Here is a link that might be useful: spywareblaster

Messenger & MSN browser have check marks .. so they are installed. You sort of did things backwards. Just browse and expand that list and put a check mark next to your Games & they'll come back. As you notice more things that don't work.. browse that again and add checkmarks. Usually nothing in there is required - all sort of optional stuff that is enabled when it does have a check mark to the item wanted. So uncheck your messenger and MSN browser & they'll go away & use a few less memory and cpu resources and save a few drive bytes.

Jane no doubt it will be an Apple commercial if it is not already! I saw one last night that could have been about this reboot over and over situation, have to admit those commercials are funny. IF you have your computers fully updated with all the windows updates and you do not want to tackle this now you do not have to (totally up to you), this is not a super critical update like sp2 was, it is rated moderate. There are some additional changes it makes to the system itself which microsoft would like people to install. But I know a lot of people have decided to at least wait some time to see if there might be some hotfixes that come out to handle some of the issues that are cropping up and there has been discussion in the microsoft forums that this time they may actually put out a hotfix for some of the problems prior to pushing out sp3 in auto update. So waiting is not a bad idea at this point. I would suggest though that you uninstall your IE 7 through add remove before you do install sp3, because if you do not you will not be able to do so at any time in the future and it also affects the ability to try to do fixes on IE7 should they be needed. You can just take it out, put in sp3 when you decide to, then put IE7 back. Or just stay as you are and continue getting your other regular critical windows updates. It is your choice. At this point in time they will not stop you from getting your windows updates just because you do not have sp3, so don't be concerned about that.

Hard to say what you should back up because we do not know what you have. All personal data, email addresses and perhaps favourites/bookmarks of course. As importantly is the drivers for all the motherboard stuff like sound, LAN IDE or SATA drivers. However if you have the CD that came with the motherboard they will all be there. If this is a factory built machine you should have either a recovery partition on the hard drive or CDs. If a factory built life can be easy, just start the recovery process and the computer gets returned to the state it was when it left the factory. You will need drivers for any add on boards like a video or sound card if these are not built into the motherboard. What make and model is this? As Zep says, don't mess with your registry. Nothing will be improved but much could go wrong compounding your problems.