Whilst I admire your staunch loyalty to a product which you like, Chris, I've just got to point out that Windows was ME introduced for one reason only. Microsoft needed to get hardware makers on board with the new driver model that would be a part of XP. So they just took Windows 98 SE and changed the driver model. In effect, when you bought ME you were just paying to be an unofficial beta tester for MS. As a result, ME was extraordinarily flaky, and MS never really bothered to fix any problems, as they were fixed with the launch of XP.