That reboot stuff is scaring me. I just came out from under a marathon debugging session. I installed the latest microsoft security fixes and drivers using windows update and now my computer blue screens upon boot half the time, crashes after a few minutes, etc. Really insane stuff. I uninstalled the security fixes and that doesn't do it. I uninstalled the drivers and it stopped bluescreening except when I run games. If I run games, it will blue screen. I finally traced it down to 3 completely independent causes that was somehow triggered by all this.

1) The drivers made some changes to *something* having to do with the video card that made it incompatible with AGP 4x .. i had to downgrade to 2x. :-(

2) the 4-in-1 drivers had to be upgraded. why it never crashed before i don't know.

3) the nvidia video drivers, the latest ones, have a tendency to infinite loop so I had to downgrade to an older variety.

(argh!!) as you can imagine, I had to work very quickly, as the computer left only a minute or two after booting up sometimes before blue screening. It took me dozens of tries before I had the video driver rolled back, the old one installed (thank god i had a copy lying on the hard drive, as downloading by 56k modem was not an option with 2 minutes of runtime). 4-in-1 drivers installed, etc..

The thought of reboots leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Calvin