Hi, I sent a post a few days ago and still have the problem plus a few more. Firstly, I have a broadband connection and when I sign onto internet explorer sometimes my home page doesnt come up and I have to try 3 or 4 times to get it to come up. Once its up, most times, I cannot access another page. If reading posts on this site, and there is a link to click on, I cannot access the link. However, I should mention that if I have AOL up and running then IE will work just fine. But with a broadband connection I shouldnt have to use AOL. This problem started a few weeks ago. I reinstalled AOL 9.0 and that didnt help. I talked to AOL tech support, and they said its spyware and not them. It just seems like AOL has taken over my puter. In the internet options/connection box... AOL is set as my default, when I click on never dial a connection, I do not have the option to set that as my default. Its almost as if AOL has taken over. Over the past 2 days, I have lost my windows explorer link in start/programs. I have it back now, but dont understand why it disappears. I have McAfee for my virus protection and my security center cannot be accesed. I just d/l and reinstalled it and it still doesnt come up. I dont understand why this doesnt work. The other night I was looking in the area where you can disable, etc services and saw that my sync clock hasnt been working, and there is DCOM error there too. I also have 66 processes running and I dont know why or which ones to shut off. Oh, and I also lost system restore, but have since corrected that problem. I went into the geek guy site, (I cant think of the correct name, but im sure you know where I mean, I have seen it posted here before) and found out how to fix that problem. These are the things I have done so far. I deleted weather bug, deleted some pure majic thing from aol, ran spybot, spyblaster, mcafee virus check, disk check error thing, ran adaware, defraged, rebooted countless times,and have reset the IE settings. I have so many resouces available to check for spyware/maleware, virus etc. I dont understand what is happening. Under AdAware there was a site that came up visiontracker.com (I cant find the exact name), anyway it tried 66 times. And one more thing, in windows explorer/c/internet explorer/connection...I tried double clicking on the file MSICW and it said the internet signup file is corrupt. If there is anyone in here that can help me, I would most appreciate it. Thanking you in advance, Nanette

Start with blackviper.com to set up the services for your configuration. It seems you may be ahead to format and do a clean install.

Per, I will check out black viper. thanx for your help. I was hoping that I wouldnt hav to do that. LOL Nanette

there comes a point when everything is soo messed up, that its actually easier to to clean and reinstall, and i guess you are pretty close to that point. when you are spending hours trying to fix it,think about the fact that it only takes a few hours to format and reinstall everything. and less headaches no frustration and a clean fresh start, it amazing how fast that puter becomes after a fresh install. i hate computers! but cant help myself....

princecorum, you are right. I dont know now many hours I have tried to fix this puter. I reinstalled windows xp tonight just hoping i could get around the reformatting....well that just created more problems. I even went as far as installing all the updates. I got to the point where I can now put in SP2, and I dont think that is going to help. When the desktop came up I was missing icons, in the start menu I was missing stuff, at that point I just sat back and laughed. After some searching, I found them in C:. Some I had to install before I could use them. I will have my husband reformat my puter for me, I dont have the slightest clue as to how to do it. I do have 1 question......the xp disk that I have has SP1a on it....do i have to do all the updates before I can put SP2 on? or can we just install windows xp with sp1 and before I load any programs pop in the sp2 disk? Thanx to all who read this and many thanks to the ones that replied. Nanette

Yes, you can install SP1 then install SP2. Then reinstall your data. That let's SP2 install the software where it wants it.

Hi, Thank you for responding. I will come back and let you know how it all turned out. Hopefully it will go smoothly. Thanx again, Nanette