Thanks for the info, None of it worked so I put the XP installation disk in and did a repair. It has got me going again but some aspects of windows are now broken (media player for instance!). A complete re-install is going to be necessary. SO I have moved anything im portant from my C: drive ready for a complete re-install. Before I do that though I have played around and made GameEx startup my wireless network and firewall using the Launch.bat approach detailed in an earlier post. I put explorer.exe in the config to run on exit but this is where it all went wrong again. When it exited it ran Windows Explorer and not the windows shell. I guess I have the wrong explorer. Can someone tell me the full path to the correct one please? Thanks Ian