I got some relief... I reformatted my drives again, re-installed the OS... check Norton's speed disk... check Hal... everything's ok... then I let Windows do it's 'critical update'... still everything was ok... about the third update screwed EVERYTHING up... Norton now swears I'm running NT 4.5, Hal complains about unregistered libraries... I just don't get it... why have these 'critical updates' when all they do is screw everything up??? Are these 'critical' updates really all that critical???