Guys I have been cursed with a weird and crazy virus. It basically ran away with my system and cut out the things that made it able to connect to the intardnet. At any rate it is now fixed...good old format C: and a repair of the master boot record as well as changing the browser and email clients to Mozilla Firefox and Mozilla Thunderbird. So if you have gotten an email from me (
nicholsw@charter.net ) since Wednesday your system quite possibly could be infected.
Once identified it didn't allow me to repair or even quarantine the dang file and that took me having to go burn anti-virus updates at my neighbors computer then come over and finally figure out what happened to the networking components of XP at which time I just said screw it and formatted and started over.