John & Bill thanks to you both.
I think what I did was do a couple badly timed system restores and it doubled up or screwed up norton the evil temp 169... is norton.
Download is again non functional.

My wife got me this Me lowest grade operating system which does not have convenient features such as replace certain window files.
Even Gateway advisors were surprised to learn how bare bones this operating system is. I once had a fix IE tab appear but it too bit the dust and has not been seen in some time.

I'll copy onto disks the many programs required to remove Norton and go to McAfee and load in on this puter to kill the beast once and for all. If things don't improve I'll format a new hard drive for the new year.

Thanks again