I had used same 98SE setup for 4 years on 6 different computers and it had no problems whatsoever, up until I put it on a 250GB HDD and had wonderful time with tons of corrupt files after crossing 137GB barrier (I'm ultr@ happy that it did not wipe out the FAT !!!)... I also had SP15 installed, later on SP21 installed. Now I have done a reinstall, having SP21 installed, and now latest KernelEx and AutoPatcher aswell, and my setup is highly unstable, I get lot of crashes. Also, in my last setup, the RAM got freed up on program exits and I always had 400MB out of 512 left to use... when the free RAM amount went too low I could ran some MD emulator which seemed to "release" all used resources and getting the RAM count back to ~400. Now it has no effect, RAM gets used eventually and I need a reboot... for the RAM thing, might this change anything that my 1st setup was done on a 166MHz Pentium1 with 32MB RAM and latest on a 1GHz Celeron with 512 ? Or something did some system tweak to get such "minimalistic" behaviour (if there is any such tweak) ? For crashes, it does not seem to make any difference if I have KernelEx installed or not, maybe the AutoPatcher has something to do with it... Sometimes when I start a program it terminates with a illegal operation error, and will run on the next try, sometimes I have to run some other program first... its all really weird...