SO... to close this out, I wound up renstalling XP (sp3) with a Dell OEM disk. "nightmare mode" summed it up pretty well. It would have been nice to save the Office 2k installation, as I havent used it in may years and it was a little nostalgic for me to see clippy and the little dog and stuff. …

Thanks for the replies, gents Corpo-crap it is... I found a program on it called Deep Freeze by Faronics which is meant to do exactly what it is doing... reverting the machine to a fixed image every time it starts up. I looked up how to get rid of it and tried some of the methods othgers had posted …

I just bought an Optiplex 745 from a local goodwill and it seems to be fully operational, though not very impressively equipped (1 gig, Pentium D, 80G hdd etc). On top of that it has XP profesional and Word 2000 on it - completely with clippy the office assistant, which I'd really really like to …

Ok, so I checked the capacitors on the video card and they were all ok, actually they were really good. I haven't checked the caps on the motherboard, perhaps they're the culprit? That is where the card gets its power from.

... but once I installed the Nvidia drivers, it did the same thing as your 5600. After recaping, it works fine... Could that be because the video card has one set of physical circuits to handle basic minimal tasks, and other dedicated circuits (the GPU?) that only come into play when higher …

Hi all! I'm building a retro pc from the bones of three machines from the early OO's and a few bits I recently found in the garage. I'd rather give too much info than too little, so if you don't care for the specifics, just page down a bit to the stupid questions... Motherboards: 1: Shuttle AK37GT ( …