Thanks everyone. Mikie - I will try that link soon. I sort of agree that if everything's fine, don't go borrowing trouble. But my laptop isn't quite fine - and I don't know what's wrong with it. The past month it's been weird. When I unplug it (to move it to another room), it just shuts down. The battery was staying at 87% all day yesterday - while plugged in. Then it sometimes takes many, many minutes to boot up after it's suddenly shut down because it was unplugged. Sometimes I have to reboot a few times til it functions properly. I updated and ran Avast, superantispyware,malwarebyte and spywareblaster. All were fine - so I don't think I'm infected. I sometimes keep a lot of tabs open at once(I'm embarassed to say how many - but since it's relevant - perhaps 2-3 dozen). I'm comparison shopping and keeping open the tabs for whatever I'm currently researching or shopping for. I know this taxes the resources. When I shut the computer down, I run ccleaner to get all that stuff cleared up. Lately it's done something else weird. Sometimes when I click to open something up in a new tab (Firefox - which was like version 5 - but they recently sprung 9 on my which I never authorized - Windows XP). So I click open a new tab. And the tabs just keep scrolling across the top. As I try to click on a particular tab, the tabs keep scrolling to the left. This happens even if only a dozen tabs are open. And this doesn't happen every time but has become frequent. I have to let it scroll for 5-20 seconds before the tabs stay still - and I can click on one. I have no idea what's going on. At first I thought I had too many tabs open - and overtaxed my system. But since it's happened with closer to 10-12 tabs (and no other programs open), I'm not sure that's the problem. Is it Firefox? My laptop? driver? Thanks. Lynn. PS damccoy - they wouldn't let me print out the page. It kept disappearing - bc. of course they want me to spend money for their program to update - they don't want to hand me the list to do it on my own.

New bios may be in preperation to avoid win7 problems or some know hardware limitation or problems. I usually update bios's. I don't know for sure but Dell 'should' have a simple failsafe install method for it. That realtech driver update is very popular. My 1.5 yr old toshiba - toshiba just offered a dozen or more hardware driver updates, mostly dealing in advance for Win7 updates. Which by the way the amazon's and other big software sellers are offering upgrade pre-orders till July 11th or while supply lasts ... 50% off sale... $50 home premium and $100 dollars pro versions.

Sorry, I've been away a bit. To take your comments in order, Kudzu: Well, I'm glad to know it isn't something MS is doing, but there is really no way someone could have gotten access to my computer, unless they came in as a burglar and left no other signs. We have very few guests, and the layout of the house makes it impossible for anyone to enter the computer room without our knowing it. I'm beginning to lean more and more to your second suggestion, that the files came along with something else I downloaded. I did download a video on YouTube a few days ago, and now a search on the site doesn't bring it up anymore, which is strange. DA: I did click to see when some of the files were created. Several were from 2005 and 2006. Do those dates refer to the time they were "created" on my computer (though I do not think I had bought this computer yet in 2005--too lazy to go hunting for the receipt tonight), or to their original creation on someone else's? If it is when they got onto my computer and I just hadn't checked the All Users folder for such things, I am still left with the puzzle of why some got into my personal regular music folder. However, I usually access My Music through the Start menu, but I had gone through My PC>C:\, etc., when I came across this problem. Can it be that the files were there all along, as Gndms suggested, and I just never happened to notice them? (In that case, I will owe everyone an apology for taking your time, and also feel like the boy who cried wolf--though unintentionally!) So long as nothing sinister is going on, I will be content. RavenCajun: I ran scans as you suggested and all seems well there. However, yesterday I checked the History section of MSE and found this: But it wouldn't have anything to do with the strange files, would it? I am wondering how it "exploits" the computer and whether or not it did any exploiting of mine before it was detected and removed. This is the first time MSE has found anything "severe." Up till now, it has always been just cookies. Didn't find any suspicious log-on activity. RUBotted found nothing, too, but thanks for telling me about it; I have Bookmarked the site for future reference. When I checked the administrative tools and event viewer, there was a great long list of events listed as warnings, dating back to April of 2006, which I am assuming was when I bought the PC. All those "warnings" are scary. Can you tell me what they mean? Should I be doing something about them? Thank you all so much for helping me. Just as a final touch for my peace of mind, I am going to run Kaspersky's scan now.

Mikie wrote I read something about if you're not Genuine you will loose some things That would not surprise me. however I think they need a foolproof program before doing that nonsense. Even one tenth of one percent with genuine Windows being denied is way too many. These days they even deny those with burned out motherboards the right to re-install Windows without a fight. Too many users would not know that and buy a second copy of Windows.