My desktop at home have been getting progressively more demented. XP finally decided that a Blue Screen it is all it’s going to do and there is nothing I can do about it. As far as I could find something had started to go wrong with the disks and the complete lockups that plagued me for a week previously was just a precursor to a much greater problem.
In the end I reinstalled the machine in the hope it could be a driver that somehow went senile with old age. After about 48 hours of running it looks ok but I feel somewhat worried anyway. We’ll see if it does resolve or not.

I should get an external terrabyte drive and backup all data after I do some spring cleaning… it’s cheap enough and I’d hate to loose all that data.