Oh--after reading the link below maybe that is not the same error message I used to get on the laptop because I had no trouble with MS Office or anything else other than the error message about a missing file when loading AOL. Joan In a message dated 2/1/2010 10:27:29 P.M. Eastern Standard Time, DULCICH6@aol.com writes: Here is an URL among many I found when putting MSVCR71.dll into Google. There are apparently a lot of people with this complaint. Here is the place for repair: http://www.instant-registry-fixes.org/how-to-fix-msvcr71dll-errors/ Sharon