I'm afraid this will be long, in the effort to help your diagnostic efforts. On cold boot (with DOS 6.2), immediately after the note to the effect: HIMEM is testing extended memory ... done I get the following 2 lines-- Bad or missing ANSI.SYS Error in CONFIG.SYS line 4 but the boot operation now seems to continue without obvious problems. The following screen traffic does seem a little ominous, however-- USDrive IDE BUS CD-ROM Device Driver Version 1.97 Unit 0 Base Address 170 Drive 0 Device version = ATAPI CDROM 1.70 Using 32 bits access Device Driver Name = CD003 CD-ROM device driver installed Bad command or file name MSCDEX Version 2.23 Copyright (C) Microsoft Corp 1986-1993. All rights reserved Drive E: = Driver CD003 unit ) 575296 bytes free memory 0 bytes expanded memory 12948 bytes CODE 2112 bytes static DATA 20882 bytes dynamic DATA 36208 bytes used C:\ My copy of ANSI.SYS is in C:\DOS My CONFIG.SYS file reads-- DEVICE=C: <Good Lord--I forgot to copy the 1`st three lines!> DEVICE=C: DEVICE=C: DEVICEHIGH=ANSI.SYS BUFFERS=20 FILES=40 BREAK=ON DOS=HIGH, UMB REM ===== USDrive IDE BUS CD-ROM Install Modification - Begin ===== DEVICE=C:\CDROMDRV\USDIDE.SYS /D:CD003 REM ===== USDdive IDE BUS CD-ROM Install Modification - End ===== -=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Of the amazing bunch at PCSOFT, can anyone draw from the above any useful information? I've had trouble from time to time, but almost everything seems to run OK right now. There is the fact that the ROM drive drawer won't close. That's a problem, of course, but otherwise all seems OK. I once noticed the CPU fan had stopped, but on cold boot it started again and has been running fine. Other problems have, for the moment, abated. --ed [log in to unmask] // [log in to unmask] The PCSOFT web site always needs good submissions. If you would like to contribute to the website, send any software tech tips or software reviews to: [log in to unmask]