My AVG will not maximize under those conditions either-never has, and I think it's by design. The other problems are more interesting: Did you install and run these programs as administrator? When I see greyed-out buttons, I immediately think of registry corruption. I would uninstall and re-install both programs. **************************************************************************** ******* The first time I noticed this was with AVG. Since it doesn't affect it's runny, I haven't worried about it. Then when I loaded & tried to use Ad-aware, the same kind of thing is happening with it but preventing it from deleting objects. There are other places I've noticed this but those are the 2 that stand out most. Anyway, with AVG, when I r-click the icon & click to run the anti-virus, the box that pops up will not maximize. The middle button is grayed out. Also, the buttons to run the scan don't work. But I can still do the scan via the menu. So.. that didn't bother me. Now with Ad-aware... it does the scan & finds objects. I tell it to either delete or quarentine but neither one will work. With quarentine, a box pops up saying 5 objects will be deleted Continue? ... But, the buttons for Ok & cancel are not in the box. And I cannot X out of that box to make it go away. I cannot get it off the screen without re-booting. I have been & still am on a Lavasoft forum hoping they can find a solution but nothing yet. :-( I have run on-line scans to see if these things are virus or worm related but all my scans come back clean. If you have any clue if there is a setting with this XP that can be corrected for this, I'd sure appreciate it "Hold No Punches.." Rode brings you great shareware/freeware programs with his honest opinions in this weekly column. http://freepctech.com/rode