I know it's been said before and sometimes by me, but I still believe it to be so, the help that one gets here through the generosity and altruism of our members is worth more than anything you can get elsewhere. Thank you so much for your kindness to those of us in trouble that we cannot extricate ourselves from without your help.

I have three machines, the 4 yr old laptop that I am working on at the moment, which thankfully has nothing wrong with it other than a bit of age induced slowless.

Then there's the 6 or so yr old desktop right behind it which is infected with the above malware. Thanks to you all for the information which I am sure I'll be able to put to good use later.

But my immediate concern is my 2 yr old Vista machine which may or may not have something similar. The problem is this: I cannot see the screen to go anywhere to fix anything! What comes up is what I can best describe as a series of plaid patterns for lack of a more technical term for what I see. I have tried the f8 key, but without knowing exactly where I am or am headed, it is a crap shoot at best. ONCE I did get to safe mode, but unfortunately, I was due to head out with family in about five minutes, and so turned off the machine without rescuing anything.

BIG MISTAKE! That was two days ago, and I have not been able to get back again in maybe 15 tries. Once I did get to a screen that gave me a series of choices, one of which was go to a restore point. I thought this might do the trick as I figured it to be the best of the choices given. Wrong decision, as it just led to one of the plaid patterns, forcing yet another shutdown.

So, hitting the f8 key a random number of times, then using the up arrow keys or the number keys has led me pretty much nowhere. I suppose that it would be nice if I had the disks that came with the machine, but some fool put them somewhere that they cannot be found at the moment.

I'm guessing that it's a display driver problem of some sort, but what do I do next? While there are things on there that I am not happy about losing, most of it is replaceable or backed up. What is gone if I have to reformat will just have to be accepted.

I hope you all can come up with something that will magically restore my primary machine to working order without too much for my limited skills to assimilate.

Again, thank you so much. Dale