DeadheadDuke

Thanks ChiefZeke for that excellent reply. It contains some really good info for all of us. Thankfully I have used user friendly partition names so they are not a problem in most cases. Sorry about the typo. I know I should have typed BCDedit but my fingeres didn't agree on that point apparently. I understand that the booted partition is going to be C: and I have no reason to ever try to change that.

Thanks guys! First, I do see the XP drive in BIOS, just not as a boot option. I can also see and access it from Windows 7. I will definitely try the bcedit commands given me and I will not change any partition letters because I realize that Windows 7 has given itself the letter C:. The old C drive partition is now shown as D:.

I just installed Win 7 on an XP rig hoping to have a dual boot setup. I put Win 7 on a separate drive and somehow the install would never complete so I finally went back and formatted the partition containing Win 7. I downloaded and burned another copy of the Iso file to DVD and this time my install worked. Unfortunately, somewhere along the way the installation made the drive containing XP appear unbootable (not shown as a boot option in BIOS). I want to somehow get XP back in the boot menu but I am unsure of exactly how to do that other than to uninstall Win 7, do a repair install of XP and go back and reinstall Win 7 and hope it works correctly next time. I would really appreciate any assistance I can get in restoring XP to the boot menu in Win 7.

I have a small home office network consisting of 3 wired and 2 wireless computers. My router is a LInksys WRT54 GS. Two of the desktops are running on Vista and the other is still on Windows 2000 Pro. The laptop is running on XP Professional. One of the Vista computers uses Ultimate and the other uses Home Premium. --Using either of the Vista machines I can see and transfer shared files to and from the other computers. --Using XP on the laptop I can see all the other computers just fine. I can do the same from the Windows 2000 computer. --Moving shared files between XP and Windows 2000 is no problem at all. --The Vista computers are visible to the XP and 2000 computers as network shares but I am unable to access the Vista computers from the others. I get the standard message that "you may not have sufficient permissions for access. Contact your administrator......" I have tried everything I can think of as far as shares and permission are concerned and I'm out of ideas. I looked into local security policies and "Access this computer from the network". It shows all the necessary entries for the Vista computer itself and also lists my workgroup name. I thought perhaps I had to explicitly enter a user name and account for the other computers in the workgroup for them to get in but when I try to apply those names I get an Security Template error that says "An extended error has occurred. Failed to save Local Policy Database." Everything I was able to find about this error suggests that it is referring to a domain server problem, so I don't think it applies to me at all since I don't have a server and am not on a domain. Can anyone offer a suggestion? Thanks in advance for any assistance.

You can order CD versions of Vista from Microsoft. Don't know the charges (probably reasonable) but they are doing it for persons who don't have DVD players. Obviously you will need to provide a product key from your DVD version. Sorry I don't remember the link but I'm sure a search for "vista on CD" at the Microsoft support site will turn up something.

Chiners 68 Regarding item 2 in your problem list: Open IE to any page, MSN will do. Now type the address for the home page you want to use into the address bar. Once you are on the page click Tools/Internet Options/Use Current/Apply. That will set the homepage you want as the default

I am using XP Pro. with SP 2 and all available patches on my Dell Inspiron 8600 laptop. Somehow a ficticious name (simply "Be") appeared in my Documents and Settings folder some time back. I was always in a hurry and I ignored the strange user name thinking it was something put there by Dell. Then I had a problem that required me to contact Dell support so I asked if they put the user folder on the computer for some peculiar remote service reason. They said no. In trying to gain some insight into the issue I have found that the folders shown under user "Be" are actually the folders belonging to another user name called "Cecil Britton Adm". The Adm indicating an account with Administrative privileges. I can not find the user name "Be" listed in Users and Groups in Control Panel, in Users in Administrative tools or in My Computer/Properties/Advanced/User Profiles so I can't delete it. I do find it in a number of registry keys. Can anyone give me a hint as to how to get rid of this phony user and get things back to normal? Thanks Cecil Britton

cbritman@cox.net For the last day or so I have noticed an Internet connectivity problem with some websites. I first noticed the problem when I tried to sign up for a paid subscription at www.wunderground.com. I had no problems until I got to the point where I was being redirected to their secure page to enter my credit card info. I was using Firefox at the time and the connection attempt timed out. I then went to IE 6 (totally up to date) and tried the same connect routine. IE failed to connect with a "page cannot be displayed" message. I started trying to troubleshoot the problem but when I tried to connect to support.microsoft.com I could not. I have since found that I can't connect to a several pages at Microsoft including www.microsoft.com. I tried pinging all the same addresses and that failed. The problem surely smells like a malware problem so I ran all my antispyware applications (Microsoft, Spybot, Prevx, Adaware) and found nothing. I ran Hijackthis and didn't find anything I couldn't account for in the report. I did a total system AV scan and didn't find anything. I removed all temporary files on my system and defragmented the drives. Then I flushed the DNS and ARP caches. Finally I removed and reinstalled TCP/IP. None of these actions have found or fixed the problem. Oh yes, I have no entries in my hosts file. I can go to another computer on my small network and access the same websites; that suggests to me that the problem is not with the router or DNS servers. I also have the same failure using either IE or Firefox on the problem computer which says it isn't in the browser. When it comes to networking I'm not the sharpest knife in the drawer, so if anyone could suggest a solution to my problem I will be eternally grateful. TIA Cecil Britton

I have noticed recently that when I tried to use the bell sound in a C++ source file I got no sound from the speakers when the activating event occurs. I opened Sounds from the Windows 2000 Professional Control Panel and checked to see if the sound was present for normal Windows events. The bell sound was there and in fact worked fine when I tested it. Yesterday I tried to set up a scenario where the bell rings and the screen flashes when I accidentally hit the Caps Lock, Scroll Lock or Num Lock keys. I did this using available settings under Control Panel_Accessibility Options. In this instance the screen flashed as it should but once again I got no sound from the bell. I checked and double checked to be sure I hadn't done anything wrong and I had not. That's when I remembered the occurence of the C++ problem that I had passed off as a possible coding error. Can anyone offer a suggestion as to why the sound might be present in some instances and not in others. Thanks in advance for your help. I'm baffled!