I know that is how it was supposed to work. I tried to choose a CLEAN install, but afterwords I was not happy with my choices. I believe that I chose to "Format the hard drive, and install XP", but I was told that another OS was installed on that partition and could not be formatted etc. I forget the different things I tried , but I wound up reinstalling my Windows Me, and then doing the upgrade to XP. I then had to reinstall Office 97 with Word and Excel. By the way, the spellcheck DOES work fine in those programs, but not with Outlook Express. Going to hit the sack for now, will check back tomorrow. Thanks for your suggestions, Mike