I am a little wary of celebrating yet (after the last episode) but I THINK it's finally back to normal, and thanks to you all for the pride and satisfaction I now feel, just the fact that I managed to follow the "idiot proof" instructions and arrive at a satisfactory conclusion is great, BUT....

Please don't ask how it's ended up here.

It has taken about two solid days of heartache, hair pulling, (not that I've got much to start with) and highly strung nerves.

I finally started by trying to do a repair, after booting from disk, which all seemed fine until it looked like it was doing a complete re installation and I could'nt stop it, anyway, it said it would take about three hours so I left it to get on with it, when I returned about three hours later it had got to about ten minutes then asked what language I wanted and had waited for me to click English, so then I was feeling sick for the next two and three quarter hours thinking I had lost virtually everything and was going to end up with a new clean pc to start from scratch.

When it had finished and rebooted it looked normal, everything was still there, the only difference was that the virus protection was turned off and a message saying computer at risk no virus protection,no problem I thought, just download microsoft essentials again, no go, kept coming up with an error code unable to load, investigated that, no luck, tried other progs no joy, none of them would install, tried onecare scans, still no joy, eventually tried my old AVG free which was still on there and it loaded, got rid of another infected file,took about an hour to update, then I got 59 updates from microsoft, then XP3 pack and after two days have now hopefully got back to normal, making sure that I have now backed up the whole thing onto my external drive and will do regular backups in future.

Still have absolutely no idea how I got here but I just hope it lasts a bit longer than last time now.

Grateful thanks to all,

John