referred to is the vicious circle problem. The same thing is happening to me. When I restore to a point before SDS 2.0 came in, the problems go away. When the machine updates itself, they're back. In my case, the video defaults to the lowest color and resolution and won't let itself be corrected (WinXP offers to correct it automatically, but nothing happens). In addition, lines of text in the word processor become solid black lines and the machine slows to a crawl. Going back to manual update may not be the complete answer - it still leaves open the question of trying to ascertain exactly which element of the update is causing the problem - maybe we'll get lucky and it'll be obvious...