When you start getting that, it is a good idea to boot to DOS and run SCANREG.EXE and select an earlier date BEFORE it got screwed up and change to it. By default you get 5 boots back . . . and unless you waste them by continually booting, you should normally find a good registry. But, every time you reboot, that 5 back rolls over and you can end up with 5 copies of the bad registry. You can adjust that in the registry to a greater number if you have the disk space. With Win98 I liked 12 back.