In a message dated 12/10/2009 6:12:17 P.M. Eastern Standard Time, BogusWoody@aol.com writes: If your hard drive is crowded, I think you'd be OK uninstalling Ad-Aware, as your other security seems to be adequate. 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