[Vista randomly shutting down, every ~1 hour]

could it be an overheating issue, since you fitted the new gfx card?

have you tried running the pc with the case off?

i installed a piece of hardware a while back in my pc and knocked the power lead out for the cpu fan and experienced random shutdowns. doh

[The "about" screen for IE6]

For Windows XP with Service Pack 2, you only need the following Internet Explorer 6 hotfixes:

Q885932 - IE stops responding or crashes, and you receive an access violation in Vgx.dll, when you view a Web page in IE 6.0

Q888240 - Some add-ons are not listed in the Manage Add-ons dialog box in Internet Explorer on your WinXP SP2-based computer

Q929969 - Vulnerability in Vector Markup Language could allow remote code execution

Q933566 - Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer

All other IE hotfixes have been superceded.

[Hardware profiles and laptop docking stations]

If anyone else is interested l mmanaged to find a way of doing this.

You will need to determine the vendor id of the wireless network card. To do this got to Device Manager, go to the properties of the wireless network card and click on the Details Tab. Make a note of the VEN string

Go to the registry HKLM-> System-> CurrentControlSet-> Hardware Profiles->0001-> System-> CurrentControlSet-> Enum->PCI

Export the VEN Key that relates to your wireless NIC to a reg file

Edit the reg file and change all occurrences of 0001 to 0000.

Double click on the reg file to import it into the registry

Go to HKLM-> System-> CurrentControlSet-> Hardware Profiles->0000-> System-> CurrentControlSet-> Enum->PCI

Then expand your VEN key, there will be a sub-key probably starting 4&…. you will need to create a new DWORD

DWORD should be called CSConfigFlags and should be set to 1 in Decimal.

[Hardware profiles and laptop docking stations]

I have a scenario where l have a laptop with both a wired and a wireless NIC. When docked l want to use the wired card and for extra security have the wireless disabled. And when undocked have the wireless enabled and wired disabled.

This can easily be done with hardware profiles. The problem l have is if l then plug the laptop into a different docking station it generates a new hardware profile with the wireless card enabled.

Is there a way of tell windows xp when creating a new hardware profile always disable the wireless card?