I was reading some posts about shutdown problems since my computer at work will not shut down. at best, the desktop icons disappear and it stays on the wallpaper until I manually shut it down. I think it was crow who asked someone with a similar issue whether "NoExecute=optout" appeared at the end of the last line under the BOOT.INI Tab in msconfig. He didn't say if that was good or not, but furthermore, mine says 'optin'. Is that a problem? Skype quit working so I downloaded the setup file again but it wont run, windows search function does not work and the computer will not restart or shutdown. everything is wrong with this machine, but if i can get it to shut down, ill be able to give it a few good reboots to start troubleshooting. Thanks in advance Wawel