Howdy: I'm trying to help a friend of mine out. She's got the oddest problem I've ever seen. Ok, so here is the deal. From the cmd prompt in windows xp, she types "date" and hits enter, and she gets back values like: E:\>date The current date is: Mon 37/17/2003 Enter the new date: (mm-dd-yy) OR The current date is: Mon 68/17/2003 Enter the new date: (mm-dd-yy) OR The current date is: Mon M/17/2003 Enter the new date: (mm-dd-yy) Now, I've never heard of out of range date values being returned. So, I thought it was: - A failed bios battery -- checked the bios time and date and it's spot on. Doesn't changed. Won't reset when machine is left unplugged over night. So I don't think that's it. - It just needs to be reset -- You can reset the day and year, but resetting the month has no effect... - From the Date & Time Properties window, the proper m/d/y information is coming out. Changing information in this window has no effect. Now, it wouldn't be a problem, but that the M value (or 65 or whatever it is at that moment) is actually coming up in applications, which means that my buddy, she can't get date values into her programs (which is bad, because that's basically all she needs to do with her software). Anyone have any idea what this one is about??? Jonathan

I don't normally jump to this conclusion, but it could well be a virus, worm, trojan, adware, spyware or whatever other malware is out there. Run a virus scan and run AdAware and Spybot. Spybot AdAware