Most of the suggestions so far have been pretty good, but we haven't really answered the original questions ..."where's da cookies."

If you haven't dug around in WinXP, it can be a little confusing.

On your boot drive, usually C:\, you'll find a folder called "Documents and Settings." In this folder, you will find a folder for each "user." In WinXP there will be one for "Administrator," one for "Default User," one for "All Users" probably one you put your name on when you set up WinXP. There may be additional ones, but that depends on how you set up your installation.

Each of these latter folders will probably contain a sub-folder called "cookies."

To manually delete cookies, you have to go through each string of C:\Documents and Settings\username\cookies, inserting the appropriate username for each one that appears on your machine.

Each of the same username folders will also contain a folder called "Local Settings," and there will be a "Temporary Internet Files" folder in each "Local Settings" folder. There will probably be many cookies in each of the the "Temporary Internet Files" folders.

To manually delete cookies, you also have to got through each C:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files location, and clean house.

You'll also find a C:\Documents and Settings\Local Service\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files in some setups, and C:\Documents and Settings\Internet Service\Local Settings, that may contain folders called "cookies."

There is also C:\Windows\Temp\Temporary Internet Files\Cookies to sweep out.

And if you really want to clean things out, you can look at C:\WINDOWS\system32\config\systemprofile\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files. There really shouldn't be any cookies here, you can't read most of what is here, and you may have to log on as administrator to change anything - but for completeness there's "temp internet" stuff in the folder. Under most circumstances, I would NOT recommend messing with stuff in this folder.

If you want to save some cookies, you can use the IE "File - Export," but the default location that it gives you is in C:\Documents and Settings\username\cookies. If you then use IE Tools - Internet Options - delete Cookies, and/or - delete Temporary Internet Files, it usually deletes everything in this folder, along with the Temporary Internet Files\Cookies folder(s), so it's not much good for backup. When you export cookies, you need to browse to a folder you create for yourself somewhere else - not a standard WinXP or IE folder - to put the backup.

Restoring cookies from a backup is "unpredictable" at best. Sometimes they work, but often they don't; so most of the time you'll likely end up doing the log-in to get a working cookie back in place.

As an incidental note, the two most highly recommended programs for "cookie cleaning," AdAware and Spybot, do not appear to search out all the places where there may be cookies. Spybot, in particular, appears to search only in places that "belong" to the currently logged-on user. I haven't researched this *fully; but if you've been relying on one of these programs to "make you safe" you might want to take a quick look at the "other places" to make sure that there aren't a few spy-crumbs lying about.

*I'd need to log on as a different user and surf to pick up some spy-cookies to test this.

Generally, if you always boot the same way (as the same user) and do all your surfing with this same "user" identity, all the cookies will be in one or two places, but if you have multiple users you may have to poke around a bit to find all of them. Windows Explorer - Search - all files and folders - search for "Temporary" and/or "Cookies" in the filename - should find all of the locations on your machine.

John