Well, dumb me and apololgies. I don't normally PM anyone, hate to intrude, and now have totally ignored another that has been so great to interact with. Our "Mr. Stevation" Between jumping forums, threads, posts.....I need a GPS. And yes I wish this site had the ability to edit our posts, along with deleting the ones no one responds to. I'm not having the problems that you have mentioned, the PMs and thread responses do come through. Although I have only sent an email 3 times. But these and the thread responses are dumped into spam, so have to check spam on a regular basis. My email is a secondary one for keeping a primary clean. I do think that the more security features we have, the more site issues crop up and not always specific to GW. Like you have mentioned, there are other sites with far better features, but the people on this forum are "kind". And, here is how I got confused with our "Steves". I was on the tools thread after reading the baby thread and went back to look at the other Steve's link to his site. I was so intrigued with how well the site was done, his beautiful and talented wife, the settings....this person went into past memories mode. After writing him, I used the back page option and landed in the wrong thread. I didn't want to write OT on the baby thread, but wanted to share with him. There was nothing secret, just special memories. For 7 years I lived about 2 miles from him, the pics of the mountains and canyons brought back so many memories. My husband and I were married in the town next to him, in the little church where "Foot Loose" was filmed. We lived up the road from the canal where they had the tractor race and the old flour mill the dance was held in the film. Had acreage right at the base of the same mountains as Steve. I had to write Steve and share how much the pics meant to me. Was curious if he was in high tech (which he is not) as both my husband and I landed in Utah due to small companies located in the area. Was hoping a bit that he may know some of the people we did. Although the area has grown 10 times over and he is the age of my youngest son. So memories flowed, as not long after our move from there my husband died and those pics of Steve's place just got to me. Our home there was priceless. Totally OT, and now I'm rambling which is why I try not to post beyond. But reason for writing him and believe me, he is living in one of the most beautiful places around. Again, my apoliges, I would be glad to write to you Stevation....on a totally different topic.

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.

Postings on the tech support forums I am on are indicating that this update has started being pushed out. You may notice your pc telling you it has updated and needs to be rebooted even when you did not do any updates. The only way to stop it is to completely turn off updates. So far I am not seeing any problems related to this update, but will let y'all know if I do. There is also another Windows Genuine Advantage Notification tool update happening, here is some info. Windows Genuine Advantage Notification (KB905474) Date Published: 8/25/2008 Brief Description The Windows Genuine Advantage Notification tool notifies you if your copy of Windows is not genuine. Overview The Windows Genuine Advantage Notification tool notifies you if your copy of Windows is not genuine. If your system is found to be non-genuine, the tool will help you obtain a licensed copy of Windows. Please note Starting this week, we will begin deployment of the latest version of WGA Notifications for Windows XP. In addition to the usual updates to validation that improve WGA's ability to detect the latest stolen or fake product keys and other attempts to circumvent product activation, this release will also include a couple of other significant updates. Continued at source along with screen shots Update to WGA Notifications Description of the Windows Genuine Advantage Notifications application

I re-installed the OS and sp3 and Internet Explorer 8. I've got it down to this error: Service registration is missing or corrupt http://support.microsoft.com/kb/971187 The automatic fixer doesn't fixit and I don't understand the manual instructions. It wants me to look at a registry key but doesn't specify EXACTLY which one. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Installer\UserData\(sid)\Patches\(squid) replaced with ( and ). How do I find SID and SQUID? I did install Trend Micro antivirus and activated Office 2003. Automatic Update seems to be working. 131 updates are being installed. This post was edited by poohbear2767 on Mon, Oct 21, 13 at 17:50