Steven and Dan,Thanks, I'll give it a shot when I get home from the office. (I assume that the clean boot is not dangerous...not irreversible...) Best,Mike

Hello Steven and Dan:It's been a few days since I was able to return to this thread and review the messages, I was the original poster of the message. After reading all I decided to try your clean boot suggestion and that seemed to rectify the problem as my C;/windows/system32 folder did NOT appear after startup. Now the question is how can I use this info to return to a normal startup sequence? Your time and effort have been much appreciated.

Take a look here for a possible solution...http://www.computing.net/windowsxp/wwwboard/forum/72544.html

My problem has been solved! Thank You edam. I followed your link and read the posts and all I did was to uncheck the entry /l:eng under the startup tab in the system configuration utility and NO MORE system32 folder!! I knew someone here could direct us unfortunate souls who had this problem to a solution. THANKS AGAIN!

Glad to have been of some help. I know how annoying such things can be.

Hi Edam, Steven, and Dan,I, too, tried unchecking the two (2!) "/l:eng" entries in the Startup Tab. Now, the startup no longer pops up the system32 window. (I hope that this also fixes other oddities on startup.)Dan, by your comment you seem to suggest unchecking qttask, realsched, and msmsgs as well. One is always happy to eliminate memory hogs--especially when running FS9 over mountains, in clouds, and with lots of complicated addons!Thanks everyone for the time and effort. Nice community stuff, this!Best,Mike MacKuen