Not sure what is going on. System is clean, just ran the AV and spyware programs so its clean.

Yesterday I could not get the computer to see the external USB CD drive. Its fine now but may have hosed something else while working on it.

Sygate will not load, it crashes with an error in SMC.EXE and closes. Also the Help and Support page will not load when I boot to safe mode. I dont care about that but it may be related as I was trying to bring up System Information. I removed Sygate, reinstalled it, even in safe mode, same thing, SMC.EXE still errors out.

Any ideas?

RobertEL, I'm really not sure if the following will work for you or not but I know I couldn't get "Sygate" to open up at the outset neither. The ONLY WAY I got it to open up and function properly is by going to "Start"(lower left corner of screen) and "point to "Programs", then point to "Sygate Personal Firewall" and click on the Sygate icon that also says Sygate Personal Firewall. If this should happen to work for you as well, copy and paste the above mentioned Sygate icon to your desktop. That's what I did and I've no problem since. Maybe this will work for you, maybe it won't, but I thought you could try it maybe.

Buddy, quite by accident I found the solution. When I tried to run Windows Update, it errored out and said I needed a MSXLM patch before it could proceed. Downloaded that and everything works once again. ;)

Okie dokie, as long as you got it goin, that's what counts. Have a nice day.

I seem to be having a different problem with smc.exe. My Windows ME is known to have a lot of problems such as freezing, crashing, etc. and I've had to shut down the computer manually many times. But when I restarted, and was about to log in, there was a message saying SMC.exe has performed an illegal operation. When I close the dialog box, my computer crashes before I can even log on to my computer. I even try starting the computer in safe mode, and it freezes as well. I'm not quite sure what to do. Any help?