My computer here at work went Tango Uniform last week, so we finally did what I have been dreading for a long time and installed a new hard drive, new video card, and upgraded from Windows 98 to Win2K.

Now, Win2K is different from what I'm used to, so it can't be any good. That's a given. But I am trying to get along with it as best I can.

There are a couple of petty annoyances that perhaps somebody may have answers for.

First, it boots up with Numlock turned off. I can watch the indicator on the keyboard, and the BIOS turns Numlock on, like it should, and then in the final stages of loading Win2K (the progress bar is a bit over halfway) the Numlock light goes off. What might be causing this? How can I fix it?

Second, I read the bbs using Netscape, opening each thread in a separate Netscape window. In Win98 I could open up as many as 50 windows/threads at one time. Win2K starts getting unhappy at 10. The first nine copies of Netscape open up normally -- I open the thread, then do an alt-tab to take me back to the list of threads so I can open the next one. But on the 10th thread, the alt-tab doesn't take me back to the list of threads in the forum but instead takes me back to the most recently opened thread (in this case, the 9th thread.) What might be causing this? How can I fix it?

I've also had to upgrade my beloved Ami Pro word processor to the later version Word Pro because Ami Pro generates General Protection Faults in Win2K. I hate Word Pro. They took a beautifully small, elegant, program and bloated it with useless "features" that I will never use that turn even the simplest operations into adventures in submenus. Any advice on how to make an old, obsolete 16-bit program work reliably in Win2K?

Where am I? And why am I in this handbasket?

tanstaafl.