Bill, my apologies if it seemed like I was attacking your credentials. I think human nature makes certain things stick in the mind that may not be representative of the overall picture and that may be true in my assessment of you. The specific messages of yours that stuck in my mind as being a bit snide... one where Kelly Slocum responded to someone waiting for an answer by pointing out that most of the people had moved to another forum due to a revised fair use policy and it seemed to me that you posted a snarky response. Another was the thread about the vermicomposters mapping site. Since I have a precocious 5 year old who is constantly asking questions and coming up with crazy ideas, I am a bit sensitive to parents, or anyone really, who seem to me to dismissive of well-intentioned but possibly imperfect ideas. Written words do seem to be inadequate at conveying tone sometimes when compared to face to face conversation. I just need to remember that more often. BTW, I did just register today on gardenweb, but I also just registered on thegardenforums too... however, I have been lurking on the vermicomposting forums and archived threads since the beginning of this year. I'll get back to learning more about worming then...

I see this was so many years ago, but I would appreciate a copy of the spreadsheet if it is still in circulation :) acroy25@yahoo.com

How do you get yourself into these problems? Because you have a problem and are trying to fix it rather than ignore it or dump your problem on someone else. I find that to be very admirable. The good thing about this is you will be learning a lot in the process of getting things back on track. The down side is it is going to take a little bit of time if we do it here. Your are very lucky because there is a lot of experience her and, super people willing to help. There should be no fear of what to do with what fix-it finds if you decide to go that route. They offer several bits of information as to what found information does, and a suggestion of what you should let fix-it do, to fix your computer. You can undo anything fix-it does, with the click of a button. If you go to do anything that will screw things up, fix-it will tell you. If anything in any of the steps does not agree with what you see on the screen, don't continue and get back to us and let us know what the discrepancy is. There are several reasons why you might not be getting to the desk top you are used to and rather than a bunch of mumbo jumbo and jargon, we'll start with the simplest reason first. From what I gather at this point, you have multiple issues that are not necessarily "Computer Problems". To best help you get on track using a forum like this, I suggest we take one issue at a time. There are several ways to skin a cat so I am going to use what I know will get you to where you want to be. Of course, if you know a faster way that works for you, no problem, as long as we both get to where we want to be. We don't know what you know so if we describe a step that you well know, it is not to insult your intelligence or belittle you, it's just to get you where you need to be in a step by step manner. 1....The folder that YOU created named "desk top", rename it to "My Icons" and do so without the start and end quotes. The folder you created, from what you indicated here, has a space between the words "desk" and "top". That's the one you want to rename. 2....Click on the START button at the bottom left of you computer screen. Look for "My Computer" and click on that. 3....RIGHT click Local Drive (C:) In the left column at the top, you should see "Desktop" with no space between desk and top. Looking down a little further, you should see C: with a plus next to it. Click on that plus. When it expands, look down the list and you should see the renamed directory "My Icons" that you did previously. Click on that and in the right column, everything you moved should be listed there. 4....At the top of this window click on EDIT and when the menu drops down, click on SELECT ALL. Everything in the right column should become highlighted, usually in blue. 5....Take your mouse pointer over to the highlighted column click down on the LEFT mouse button and HOLD IT DOWN. While holding it down, drag everything over to the left column and up to the "DESKTOP", at the top of the left column. You will see the DESKTOP change color when you are on it and at that point, let up on the mouse button. Make sure you are on the DESKTOP name and that it highlights because if you don't, you may move everything into another directory, compounding the issue!!! Everything should now be back the way it was before you moved your desk top. If everything is back to what you are used to, we'll take the next step. My particular next step is going to ask for a list of everything in the task manager under the tab "PROCESSES". Do a "Ctrl" "Alt" "Delete". When the task manager pops up, click on the "Processes" tab. After you enter this tab, hover your pointer over the words "User Name". This will be the name of one of the columns. You have to hover over the actual words. Left click that and you will see everything organize itself. If you could then get us a list as it appears on your screen, we can work on the next steps. I have to go on an errand so it might be some time before I get back to you, I live in a rural area. Someone else here may pick up where I left off, I have no problem with that. The beauty of this particular forum is many knowledgeable people willing to help.

Maybee your IE is still there and you can use it at any time even with firefox open they work fine together, all you do is just click on the big blue IE icon on your desktop and it will open your IE browser do the same for firefox just click the firefox icon and it will open firefox. Which ever one you want to use you just click it's button. If you have the firefox icon on the desktop you can just grab it with your mouse hold down the button and drag the icon down there to the quick launch bar where your other icons are then let go and it should create a new icon for you down there too. When you want to go to the windows update site to get any windows updates you will have to do that using your IE browser because Microsoft will not accept firefox. That is the only place I ever use my IE now, I use firefox for everything else. This will not at all affect your Windows updates if you have them set to do automatically or to notify you. Only if you want to go to the actual windows update webpage then you need to click on your IE icon and use it. Your windows update notifier is not tied to your browser at all so this will not change that at all you will still see that update notifier the same as before. To do any updates for firefox itself it will occasionally check automatically for updates and if it finds some it will pop up and tell you that it has found an update for your firefox or for any add ons you may have then you click ok to let it do the updates, it will then tell you it has to restart firefox (not the whole pc just firefox) say ok and it will shut down firefox then re-open it and the updates will be installed automatically. Have you managed to get your home page set up on firefox now? If not what you need to do is just go to the webpage that you want to use as your home page, for example if you wanted to use this forum, while you are on the website here you would click up top tools> options then on the main tab there you will see where you have the options for setting your home page, just select the one that says use current page, that will set the page you are currently on as your home page, anytime you want to change it just go to the page you want to set and do the same thing again. You will want to in that same Options box click on the tabs tab and in there make sure these are selected, new pages should be opened in a NEW TAB then there are 4 options below that and you want to make sure the top 3 are selected. If you need to change the font type or the size of the fonts on the pages you can change that in Options >content tab When you want to clear your cache on firefox you go to Options> privacy then at the bottom is your option to clear the cache, when you click that it gives you more options/settings on exactly what you want it to clear, I always have mine clear cache and download history. you can also clear the cache by clicking on Tools > clear private data. Once you get the hang of firefox and start trying some of the wonderful add ons that are available for it you will wonder why you did not try it sooner.