Followup about my Access problem for the geeks among us. A few weeks ago when my desktop had a major crash, the guy who fixed it did me a "favor" by adding a spare memory stick to the tower. So I went from 512mb to 1 gig of RAM. It turns out that it's a known MS problem that Access 97 and other older software packages can't run on machines with 1 gig or more of memory. Who knew?

From the Microsoft website:

The Windows 32-bit protected-mode cache driver (Vcache) determines the maximum cache size based on the amount of RAM that is present when Windows starts. Vcache then reserves enough memory addresses to permit it to access a cache of the maximum size so that it can increase the cache to that size if needed. These addresses are allocated in a range of virtual addresses from 0xC0000000 through 0xFFFFFFFF (3 to 4 gigabytes) known as the system arena.

On computers with large amounts of RAM, the maximum cache size can be large enough that Vcache consumes all of the addresses in the system arena, leaving no virtual memory addresses available for other functions such as opening an MS-DOS prompt (creating a new virtual machine).

So at least I know the cause. (What obscure crap I have to deal with just trying to create labels using Access for Christmas cards). Now I have to figure out the workaround.