I'm benching a Presario 2266 desktop. Was told that mouse was not working. What I found was that upon Win98 boot, a multimeda screensaver activates before the desktop is even displayed. At this point, system locks, and all that is displayed is wallpaper (airline promo related to screensaver). Cannot reach owner since unit dropped off to find out when problem occured (assuming since screensaver install). The person who dropped it off (owner's brother) just said it's okay for me to reformat. This seems viable and easy option, but I want to hear that from the owner directly. Ran F-prot from DOS. Clean. Tried restoring earliest registry from DOS. No joy. Removed screensaver load from system.ini and was able to boot. However, system was sluggish. 128MB RAM, with 84% utilization. Cookie&Cache application and task scheduler running. Disabled C&C app. Searched resgistry for suspect apps loading upon boot; none found. Rebooted, and once again same problem: lock up. Even the wallpaper (which I had disabled) returned. It's the only thing on screen, no taks bar, no icons, no repsonse. Tried running windows setup; crashes w/o error msg. Thought retrying setup and skipping reg. check would help; same outcome. Anyone have any suggestions. TIA Ian Carmichael Do you want to signoff PCSOFT or just change to Digest mode - visit our web site: http://freepctech.com/pcsoft.shtml