imagine my surprise when windows crashed properly and irrecoveralby on me...

imagine my fruther surprise when after a windows (so called) reinstall, my modem wouldn't show up when i wanted to connect to the net (even tho device manager said it was working fine)

imagine my joy to find out of the local repair shop it was a known problem with XP, and the only thing i could do was to format my hard drive and start from fresh

the only thing i'm glad of is if i had taken my PC to them it would cost me £45+vat to format and reinstall

problem solved, but i'm not happy

That sounds supiciously like the blaster virus. So that it doesn't happen again, I'd recomend you get fully service packed up, get your virus scanner up to date, and get the security patch from MS.

Kingr