Foolestroupe -

I do remember seeing the WinME defrag recommended for Win98 users, but don't recall that I ever tried it. Of course there were lots of utilities for almost everything 'way back then.

There's also a "crossover" application with Format, due to the ability of some later Win versions to read drives larger than they can format (without partitioning). Don't quote me, but recollection is that the WinME format was recommended for Win2K if you wanted to format what we'd now consider a medium sized disk, and if you wanted one of the newer format types you had to format FAT (or FAT32?) and then "convert" after format. They admit that when you "convert to NTFS" you don't get all the same "benefits" as when you format NTFS directly, but never would say what got bent.

The current email difficulty looks like a "log-in" problem, since other obvious possibilitie have been examined. It's similar to something that has happened to me (about every 3 to 6 months) with HotMail, but I didn't expect that Yahoo would be stupid enough to replicate Hotmail's lack of control.

We've had several instances of "disconnects" over the past several years with Hotmail, and it's always been because they "moved the server." Almost every time they've done that, they've "automatically" redirected my email to the new server, but in the process have trashed the rest of my setup. It usually has required 'phone support¹ to find out how they've screwed it up.

¹ You can't get phone support for Hotmail - unless you have a "premium" service. Ours is, but they keep trying to say it isn't. I've managed to bully my way in via our MSN account to inform them that we do have a premium service because it's an "associated account" for the "Charter MSN" one, but otherwise I'd have been off the air 5 years ago with them.

John