Well, it coulda been much worse; I figured I would at least be out a hard drive. Turns out it was totally eaten alive by all sorts of viruses and nasties. I had McCaffee running, with updates coming in all the time, and I was running Spybot fairly often, but I had gotten chock-full of garbage anyhow. The repair shop put in AntiVir and Ad-Aware after they flushed things out. The guy advised against a firewall for a machine on dialup. Anyhow, the bill wasn't that bad, and this thing hasn't purred along as well in many moons.