I had a similar problem in Windows 95, and I had a work-around that might apply here. The work-around did not fix the bug, and it's a bit of a brute force hack, but it did the job until I upgraded to Win98 (where the bug was fixed).

My problem was that Win95 had bugs with certain IDE controllers. It would intermittently refuse to load the 32-bit device drivers and go into "MS-DOS Compatibility Mode" on the hard disks. This slowed things down to a crawl. And once it had happened once, Windows figured that the IDE controller wasn't compatible with the 32-bit device drivers and would put a "NOIDE=1" entry in the registry, forcing the bug to happen every single time the system booted.

So my solution? Create a registry file with "NOIDE=0" in it, then add that registry file to my startup group. If the bug ever happened again, it would at least fix itself on the next reboot.

So, in your case, something similar might work. Give this a shot:

- Attached to this BBS post is a file. Download that file.

- Unzip the file file into a known location with an 8.3 (non-longfilename) directory name such as "c:\bugfix"

- Create a new SHORTCUT in your StartUp group. (If you haven't enabled multiple-user-profiles on your computer, this folder is located in c:\windows\start menu\programs\startup. Open this folder in Windows Explorer, right-click on a blank area of the folder, and say "new... shortcut".)

- In the "command line" box for the shortcut, enter regedit /s c:\bugfix\bugfix.reg

- When it asks you for a name for the shortcut, call it "Bugfix".

See if the problem now fixes itself with each reboot. I don't know if it will, no guarantees...

If not, try editing every occurence of the "EnableAutodial" key in the registry. On my system, I found it in HKEY_CURRENT_USER, in HKEY_USERS\.Default, in HKEY_CURRENT_CONFIG, and in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Config\0001.

Let us know how you do...

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Tony Fabris