dear people i have just joined the forum, i am car313, newbei. i am facing a strange problem. i downloaded some freewares, free tutorials and some funny pictures from the net. i put all of them in a folder by name 'Anand' on the desktop. later i copied them from this machine (hp pavilion 128 + 64 ram, 11 gb hdd, windows me) to another machine on the lan. now is the crazy part. this other machine on the lan is win 2000 prof with 512 mb ram 40 gb hdd. there was along delay and a window on the win 2000 machine popped up and said the program was not responding. there was no name on the title bar of this window. i presumed that the copy thing had gone bad and clicked end task. after some time all icons on the deskto disappeared and reappeared, but some icons from the system tray did not come back. i restarted the machine and everything was ok. i wanted to see if the files in 'Anand' folder (on the win me machine) were all right and double clicked the folder. as soon as i did the machine (win me) started rebooting. this went on for quite some time. i started the machine in safe mode and did a scandisk and rebooted. after the boot process the 'Anand' folder opened again and the machine rebooted. this went on for quite some time and again rebooted into safe mode and renamed the folder. i restarted the machine and it behaved normally, except that it complained that the c:\windows\desktop\Anand was not found, removed or the network connection is not there. i clicked ok and it was fine. i copied the (renamed) folder over the lan onto a third machine and burnt them on a cd. this cd opens fine on the win 2000 machine and the third machine (win 98 se, 256 mb ram 12 gb hdd). but when i tried opening this cd on the win me, the same restarting again and again. another thing when i start the win me and press esc at the password prompt, the machine behaves normally. what could be going on? any help will be greatly appreciated. TIA! car313 absence of proof is not proof of absence

car313, SWAG, suspect that there's some sort of nasty in the folder and you activated it when you opened the folder (similar to opening mail). Do an online scan at one of the free sites found @: http://windowsxp.mvps.org/Scanners.htm and see if you can clean it out. Difference in the ME machine and the 2000 machine may be the differences between FAT 32 and NTSF(?). HTH. Ed in Texas.