Used the Zip-disk that has my virus-killer engine and Zone-alarm on it, and my troubles started again, and got to about as bad as they can be.

As noted before - DUH????

Win98 will do just fine for your local forums - ActiveX,JAVA should be disabled since the newer (government) sources can be overwhelming.

Norton is still awsome - you can recover records that have been shredded - by reading "between the lines" and using common sense.