I have a 350 P-II with 256Meg of RAM on a 440-BX mobo. My "clean" installation of Win-ME is now more than a year old. I suspect that may be part of my problem.
Windows Family Logon is set up for three users. While each of us does some things differently, all users start both Zone Alarm and Norton Anti-Virus (part of System Works 2000 [2001? - don't recall off the top of my head, but it is the right one for ME]) at Start-Up.
I have all the latest updates for Zone Alarm, Norton, and Windows, including IE6 and Media Player 8. I am not sure, but the problems seem to have started around one of three events (which were fairly close together). 1. Upgrading to IE6; 2. Upgrading to the latest free version of Zone Alarm; or, 3. Installing the latest NVidia reference drivers for my old TNT AGP video card (Diamond Viper V-550- 16meg).
Problems include the following, but the first two were what inspired me to write this:
1. Intermittently, booting the machine and choosing a User leads to the message POPROXY - "Norton Anti Virus is unable to start eMail protection. Please ensure that TCP/IP is installed and port 110 is available." I click OK, wait for the launch to complete, open NAV, and enable email connection manually when this happens.
2. Almost always, when one User logs off and another gets on, ZoneAlarm fails to start for the new User. A brief error message appears and then disappears.
3. If I launch Windows Update, almost nothing happens. IE opens, a few "opening" words appear at the lower left of the page, followed quickly by the word "Done" at lower left of a blank page. Waiting does not seem to do anything. I presume this problem is Java related, even though other JAVA items seem to work.
3. Similarly, if I try to view an MPEG video or the like online, I get a tiny box and nothing else on the page, again with the word "Done" at the bottom.
4. If I try listening to music with Media Player ( NOT my default choice) I get a message telling me of an error and that Media Player will now close. If I ignore it (say at the CDNOW page) the music will play, but no Media Player controls are available. Once I click OK, it closes and the music stops.
NOTE: I've just tried removing and reinstalling the NVidia reference drivers, and do not know if I have accomplished anything, but I did get the NAV error message described above when I rebooted.
Also, sometimes when I reboot the system seems to hang for too long a time, with only a blinking cursor in the upper left hand corner. When I get tired of waiting and hit the "reboot" button, it tries to start in Safe Mode, but will start normally if I ask it too. Either way, I get a 16 color screen and a message that something is wrong with my video drivers. I play with settings and reboot a few times and get back to normal, but that's a pain. But again, I do not know if reinstalling the drivers will help with this or not, yet.
One real bad sign was that some new folders appeared in my C;\ directory with names like DIR00000 and DIR00001. One contained a game I thought I installed on another partition. I tried to launch the game from the start menu, but it was not found until I browsed it to the DIR00001 directory.
OK, I realize I have some unrelated things here, and too many for one question. 200 points to start, and more depending on how many different things get fixed. I wojld prefer not to do a clean reinstall if I can help it.
