thanks for the reply and the housekeeping... I thought I had added to the thread, but alas, no... so thanks for putting them together.
I've updated and run malawarebytes, ccleaner, roguefix, hijackthis, at&t antivirus, at&t antispyware... given what I understand, there don't seem to be trojans or viruses... getting "all clear" messages on chkdsk...
i've cleared cache, cleaned disk, and defragmented.
Windows XP home... (Dell 2000 Dimension 4300 , Intel Pentium 4 CPU 1.6 GHz 1.59GHz 256MB of RAM... this puppy belongs to my 84-year-old mother and I'm trying to speed her up!)... 82% Free Space on Hard Drive...
I'm trying to sort through some of the stuff that turns up on HijackThis and Autoruns, but have never "gone there" and am puzzled... I thought I did everything the bp tutorial told me to do, but 98% of the startup entries yielded the response "search term not found", which I found especially odd given the more common microsoft and hp apps... I realize those aren't malicious, but I find it hard to believe that all 650 of them need to be operating at startup! That is the whole purpose of the startup database, right?... to give you a Y or N or U or whatever, right?
any advice would be greatly appreciated...
and thanks again for your response.
Earl Gray