John, that's very interesting. At one time I used to be quite conversant in DOS but I haven't used it much for several years. But I have stumbled onto another problem that perhaps this thread can address, since we're all in there poking around under the hood. If there's much to it, I'll go look for a TECH thread to stick it onto.

I have been having difficulties getting my browser and Real or Windows Media Player or Winamp to play clips I find on the Web. There are actually two sorts of functions that I think my Norton Firewall is blocking; sometimes when pages don't view properly I go in and turn off the adblocker and the javascript appears on those pages (this is a real problem at Travelocity, for example). When I can't hear them I try turning off the ad blocker and nothing happens, but I don't want to (in Star Trek lingo) "lower my shields" to everything just to let a sound file through.

SO, I tried updating those audio programs to see if Norton would somehow adapt to their presence, and in the process, Real had me delete the old program. I found Real One to be bossy and annoying so I removed it, and the darned thing asked about deleting shared (but it assured me unused files). I wasn't paying close attention and I let it remove a few before telling to leave them all alone.

You've guessed where this is going, I'm sure: This morning I booted up and found the warning that I'm missing mrbupd.dll. I did a little research and don't see it as something I would ordinarily USE, but I hate those little warning screens that come up forever if you don't do something about them, and that halt the progress of setup until you do answer it. I browsed my Win2000 installation disk and it don't find it in there (I used "Search"). I tried reinstalling Real (I installed it "custom" and kept it really dumbed down and didn't let it be default for playing anything) and the file does come back with it, as far as I can tell. It didn't turn up in Search just now.

In the past I've been able to search the Web and find replacement files when I needed them, but none of those links, when they appear in Google, seem to go to active web sites with those files on store. I'm going to restart the computer and go poke around in the other platform and see if I have a copy of mrbupd.dll over there and copy it, but I'm not holding my breath.

Any thoughts?

SRS