the machine is running much better .... no more excessive cpu usage alerts, no "com surrogates" showing up in processes in task manager, and no more continuous disk writing. I have my fingers crossed! I am getting a quirk when I do a google search (not chrome, just an ordinary google "search"), though, where, after I type what I want it to search and hit the "enter" key, the main portion of my screen goes white and in the top left corner I get text that says "click
here if not redirected within the next few seconds". When I click the "here" my google search results are shown in the ordinary, expected format. I assume that may be just something in my IE 11 that got reset??? I can very easily live with that (as compared to where we started
) and otherwise, everything else seems to be in-tact, and running very well! Just by the way, can you tell me what file was causing me the problem, and where it might have come from. Reason I ask is that I have this computer "locked down" to require administrator password to make any changes to the machine and I am the only one who has that password, and I try to be very careful about what (and where it comes from) gets allowed to be put on this machine. Thanks, Bob.