Fair comment - there are so many factors which can affect speed that all avenues need to be explored!!

A hard disk which has too little free space, or is too fragmented to allow a large enough swapfile is often the biggest culprit, and they are so cheap these days (I've just paid £79 for a 20Gb!) that it's often worth relegating the old drive to D: and adding a new C: drive - that way you don't need to worry about losing data.

However, one problem which is often overlooked is 'cut and paste'! After a few c&p's, an already over-stretched PC can slow down to a crawl, or even crash altogether. You can use the clipboard viewer to clear it, although a re-boot is usually more effective...

MicroShaft don't make it too public that Windows 95 and Internet Explorer require 32Mb RAM as an absolute minimum to run satisfactorily - 64Mb is more comfortable. You can alleviate the problem by uninstalling 'Active Desktop', which isn't a lot of use to the average user - I found this out from MS's 'helpdesk'! Yes! They told me something useful!!

Any road up, how is the problem progressing, Ed? You've gone very quiet!!