Does the owner have an external drive they can boot off to see if the problem is system related or potentially hardware related? Coj Steve Robertson <stever at mindspring.com> This doesn't have anything to do with video, but this is the largest group of Mac experts I can contact easily. A friend of mine bought an old Powerbook from me. It runs OS 9.2.2 and is connected to the Internet by a cable modem. About a week ago, the cable company suffered some extensive storm damage. When the cable service returned, my friend found that she could not open the two pieces of software she uses most of the time – Internet Explorer and Outlook Express. After doing some exploring, I found that any software that relies on the Internet would not open. In other words, Netscape Communicator behaves exactly like the Microsoft products. They put up a splash screen, then just disappear. No dialog box. Any software that does NOT rely on the Internet opens and works fine. The control panels that relate to the Internet will open and have all the correct info entered. I even tried switching to the basic control panels. No help. The cable company is coming today to make sure the cable modem is working properly, but I can't imagine any way that a bad cable box could kill software like this. Any ideas? Thanks, Steve R.