I just lost my connection to shorty - switched to ragtime.

It's getting late at Kendall's location, so he may not want to come back tonight. - or may be having trouble getting back on.

I'm concerned about his problem running defrag. It may indicate marginal free space on the drive. Windows, in earlier versions required "contiguous" free space for temp files. It's not as much of a problem with Win95 and Win98, but if the drive is badly fragmented, temp swapping can be impaired.

I would suggest looking at total file space and total free space on the drive, to get an estimate of how "crippled" the machine may be.

Start - Programs - MSDOS Prompt.

Should see C:\Windows >_

Type "cd\" (omit quotes) and hit enter

Type "dir *.*/s" and hit enter

Record total files(s) ????? bytes and ???? bytes free from the last two lines after it runs its course. i.e. what are the ????
Type "exit" to close the window.

I would suggest that he post a url for one of the links that doesn't work, so that someone else can try to connect to it, to see if it's just a bad url.

Outlook/Outlook Express can be set to show "plain text" and if he's gotten it turned on that way, what he sees in his email may not actually be a link.

There is some significance to whether he is running Outlook, or Outlook Express, and which version.

I'll try to check in periodically for a while, but may be away from the machine intermittently.

John