Nancy, That's a lot of cookies, and it appears your computer was infected with the WIN 32Adware.BHO and WIN.Trojan.Ransom virii/trojan families. That could possibly explain the ghost in your computer, but I don't know how it would boot the computer from "off" on its own. You might run Ad-Aware again later and see if it rid your computer of the win32.adware.bho bug. Some say Ad-Aware puts the bug in quarantine, but next time the computer is rebooted, it's there again. If the bug shows up again, try a full scan with your McAfee and then another with Ad-Aware. Then if that doesn't work, try the specialized, very effective Malwarebytes at http://download.cnet.com/Malwarebytes-Anti-Malware/3000-8022_4-10804572.html Be cautious, as on that page there are many places to download the wrong programs. The right program is in green, says "Download Now" and is 4.62MB. In conclusion, it looks like Ad-Adware just removed one heckava bunch of cookies that was slowing you down, and removed or quarantined two virii/trojans -- but perhaps just temporarily. More scans will tell. Woody ================================= In msg 12/10/2009 8:36 PM CDT, Nlpakkala@aol.com writes: Woody, Here are the results of my Ad Aware scan- total of 397 objects. 395 cookies, WIN 32Adware.BHO adware-1, and WIN 32.Trojan.Ransom-1 It took about two hours and somewhere near 200,000 files. I checked to see how much space and I have 65.4GB free out of 88.7GB so I should have plenty of room to leave the Ad-aware program installed. I'm sure you are right about needing more RAM which we will do before long. Maybe that is why it takes sooooo long for AOL to load. It goes thru the first two steps quickly but getting thru the third step takes quite a few minutes. When my computer re-started all by itself I hadn't installed the Ad-aware program yet so there must be a ghost here somewhere. Thank you for all your good advice, I really appreciate it. Nancy