Although I am not fond of PCs, it's not a good idea to characterize PCs by the behavior of VPC (any version). There are many issues that arise due the the limitations of the emulator that are not indicative of a full-size PC running Windows. Again, I'm not defending PCs, but I personally am not impressed by VPC. It's slow and torturous to use. It's nice to have when you don't have a PC and HAVE to pull up a simple application, but any prolonged use and dependence is not my idea of a good time. I've had similar problems to the one you are describing and had to mess extensively with the VPC prefs to get better behavior. Updating to the latest version was also helpful. Best of luck to you. I know this kind of thing is a headache. -Jer >> So I downloaded Awave. Next Virtual PC (or Windows) complains that >> there are too many open 16-bit files -- "please quite some 16 bit >> programs or increase the FILES line in config.sys". Since there's >> nothing to quit, I add a line "FILES = 32" to config.sys. Still the >> same complaint. Then changed this line into "FILES = 256". Now the >> installer seems to launch, resulting in a hard crash, which is >> reported to be caused by Explorer (which isn't running at all)??? >> Ctrl-alt-del to reset the PC... And out of ideas...