Leadfingers, thanks for that one, I had thought of that but at the moment I am not running E-mails unfortunately, but thanks anyway.
Bill D. This has been tried with two seperate drives, both have had the caches cleared before trying to log in. I routinely clear my applog directory, my cookies directory, (except for the ones I know are from the 'cat), my temp directory and delete my temporary internet directories, so I am at a loss to understand what is going on here.
I would have thought that putting two different drives into the machine would have eliminated any problems that may be on either one of the drives, leaving just the BIOS to give trouble, (if it was going to), I have also checked through the bios on the off chance that there was a cookie blocker in there but can't find anything.
The machine is accepting cookies from other sites, so they are getting through to me, maybe I would be better off wiping the drive and starting again, I am partitioned up, so it isn't that difficult, it just means a few hours to re-set everything back again and I was hoping that I might get away with not doing that.
I could also try running windows install again over the top of the previous installation which might cure it.
Before replying to this I went through the above sequence of clearing out the cache and other things with the same result, when I log in again it tells me that I 'AM' logged in, but if I try to access my PM's it tells me that I have to join the 'Cat, it would appear that only one cookie is coming through where I should normally have two. It still doesn't work if I copy the cookies from my other drive by the way. ????????
Thanks to both of you for replying to this, if you have any more ideas I would be interested for future occasions or if someone else has the same problems.