umm, yea- I'm still w98se. I've spent years getting to know the bugs, thats why I love it- I KNOW it. It's just weird as nobody has apparently seen this bug (according to MS) and I assume MT never tried what I did by accident. I fixxed it by restoring a registry backup done the day before I originally installed mercs and all the patches. Anyhow it works now (3.0 anyway) and I'm gonna wait a few days to see if MT actually got the bugs out of the bugfix.