I've just spent two days trying to sort out a PC which had been hit by a clutch of nasties which had taken whole chunks out of the guy's registry (e.g. his Cryptographic Services had gone completely, which meant that many new installations were impossible): errors for which Microsoft seemed to have no answers whatsoever. Just at the point where I was off to buy new him a new hard drive so that I could clone all his files across and do a new clean installation of XP, I stumbled on a wonderful site which not only contains the DOS codings for regedit solutions to a huge number of issues, but has them in an easy to use form. Hopefully you'll never need any of this, and they're not to be played around with willy-nilly, but the two entries which I knew he'd need worked like a dream, and there may be a few of you out there who may one day find them a life saver.

http://www.kellys-korner-xp.com/xp_tweaks.htm

He now has the recent Norton 360 up and running - it's not freeware, but it really seems to do the job, although he's installed a couple more programmes which don't run permanently behind everything else, but can be called upon to do a sweep as and when - as Andy suggests, nowadays belt and braces (so long as there's no system conflict) seems to be the best policy.

That looks a pretty useful collection of registry edits Ron. I'll bookmark it even though I hope, as you say, never to need it. I'm quite happy doing manual edits to the registry once I've worked out what I've got to change but it would be useful to have things automated.

I've avoided Norton like the plague since I ran Norton AV 2002 on my old ME desktop and had no end of problems, leading to my having to reformat the HD 2 or 3 times. I have found the Norton Utilities disc which I got with it useful though. In particular, when I was trying to install Kubuntu on my old m/c, the Master Boot Record got in a bit of a mess which meant that nothing would install at all. So the Norton utility which allows you, when run from the CD, to write directly to any sector of your hard drive, including sector 0, was very useful

I`ve just bought a new mouse as the old one has been throwing tantrums. I`ve just read the instruction booklet and feel a bit uneasy about progressing further before asking some advice.

Firstly, it says that I should "uninstall" my previous mouse programme. Is this absolutely necessary? Surely I`m going to need a mouse to select the options on the new mouse CD?  If so, where do I find the mouse programme?  I don`t want to end up mouseless!

Any thoughts?

Ta John. So you didn`t have a mouse CD programme to install with the new one?

Edit.  Right, I`ve been having a thunk. I suppose I could just plug the new mouse. If nothing happens, well, that won`t be a disaster. Then I`ll have to go down the CD route. Gulp. If you don`t hear from me again, it`s been nice knowing you all /color]

Here I go ..... <holding nose and jumping emoticon>

Fantastic; a change of mice can be rather like a change of bedsheets, under the appropriate circumstances...

Mort,

Is your new mouse an optical one, i.e. no ball and fluff? Optical mouse: no mouse-mat required, which was more good news for me 

Which suggests that you don't use a glass-topped desk, John. Optical mice generally work better on a keyed, opaque, surface, so a with glass-top a mat will still be advisable .

Ants, I have been a very conscientious mouse cleaner. I fear that it finally keeled over as a result of repeated feline abuse. One of my cats recently started getting stroppy with it and whacking it onto the floor, before then trying to sabotage my keyboard. Anyway, the mouse was showing signs of Antheil Syndrome - bald patches where my lily white fingers had rested