-----Original Message----- From: Brian Kelsay

Some helpful hints. Use them or not.

1. The drive, cable or drive controller may be bad or going

bad. Make sure the drive is not set to cable select. Check cable for nicks or cuts. Try another CD drive in it.

Not that, or that, or that. No that either. Nope, the cable is fine. Nope happens with many different CDs. And the ones it happens to work fine in other CDs. It could be related to being an "old" cheapo CDROM.

2. Hold down the shift key ... but each Winders is a bit

different so I can't give more detail.

Exactly.

5. Ctl-Alt-Esc on NT/Win2k/XP, end any process that is not

responding. NT may want to reboot depending on what was frozen, the other 2 recover semi gracefully. If you are using a 95/98/ME version, or you can't follow any of this free advice, my rates are.....

Only works if the application is accessible in the tree. Some applications are hidden or run with administrator privilege and an "ordinary" user can't stop them. Also some applications simply won't allow you to stop them. So this has limited usefulness. True, there are some 3rd party utilities that can overcome this, but you have to know what they are and have them installed on your box.