Hi Joe

Many thanks for your comments.

The situation you supplied where the Microsoft Technician was aswering a request for help is EXACTLY what happened to me. It is described batter there though.

As I said earlier I did a restore more or less straight away and it appeared to have solved the problem. Since then I have run my Malware and spyware and virus checkers. They have all reported no problems.
I also ran a disc clean program and again nothing was reported.

As a final check I am running Malwarebytes - it takes a long time and after an hour and 10 minutes it is reporting as clear.

I also uninstalled the program that I believe caused the problem "NCH Photostage". It was a bit " reluctant" to go but I managed it in the end.

Thanks once again for you help - as somebody said here earlier this week, Mudcat comes up with technical help and assistance far better than most of those "Geeky" technical help and support sites.....and long may it continue.

Cheers

Mike