[Fyron]

Almost always such restrictions have been empty power grabs by contract lawyers which have been ignored in practice, however. Humane companies would not cause a stink, for instance, if you want to install, say, a game both on your desktop and your laptop, etc. XP goes one step further and actually tries to sabotage itself by analyzing your machine, using your Internet connection to phone home to the M$ Mother Ship, etc. That's not a practice I care to support by paying someone hundreds of dollars for XP. No way, Jose.

No... almost always such restrictions have been how software is sold. It has nothing to do with being humane. Note that I said RUN, not INSTALL. There is a world of difference between having a piece of software installed on two computers and only using one at a time, and then having that software installed on two computers and using both installs at the same time (such as pirating an OS by installing it on more than one computer).

It always amazes me when someone uses "I never noticed a problem" as a counter-argument to "it didn't work for me".

That was not my "counter argument". My statement was just of the nature that you have experienced an uncommon problem.

Trust us Fryon

You are multiple people?

there are cases, who knows why, when it just fails to find files that are there. I've tested and had XP search and find nothing, followed by another search program running the same search, which finds files.

I have used the XP search extensively and it has never once failed to find a file that was there. I have used it on other computers without a hitch as well. You might have gotten your copy of XP from a OEM manufacturer that did something to the kernals to alter the search function.

Of course you can have it re-sort manually. That's not a fix, though, it's a known work-around.

That is assuming that the order you want it sorted is the only correct order. They had to pick an order. That is not a bug in any shape or form.

Sure. You must've turned it off, but by default, every few days or weeks, XP decides to launch a wizard in the user's face, perhaps with a hateful cartoon character and cutesy "speach bubble", saying something like, "Hey, XP has noticed you haven't used some of your desktop icons in a while. Would you like to stop what you're doing, and go through a wizard that asks you about all of them, and gives an option to delete them?" Yeah, there's a way to turn it off, but it's just an example of the many annoying goofball innovations of XP.

Hmm... I have never once turned that off, nor even heard of such a feature. Must only be in some Versions of XP home...

I do that on my own XP box at work, but there is still some crud left over that is not on 2K or 98. And the extra 2K stuff isn't particularly useful, except for disabling as many as possible of the unwanted default processes that launch and waste resources and CPU.

It is quite easy to customize what is in the start menu (especially easy to do in XP). Again, how you want it to look is most certainly not the "right" way to do it, nor the only way. Just because you don't like the default start meny does NOT mean that there is anything wrong with it, just that you don't like it and need to customize it.

Or that were set up by default.

I have always seen the option to not install various windows components when installing XP. The accessibilty features are one of them.

The one that keeps happening to me, even on systems where I've told it to stop, is the "Hey, you've been holding down Control for more than five seconds - would you like to enter Accessibility mode?" wizard which attacks and messes up what I was doing at the moment.

You have been rather unlucky then, as it has always stayed disabled every time I have disabled it, and it stays disabled for everyone I know that uses XP.

I suppose it reoccurs because of the frequent "updates" which sometimes reset default system options, such as the existance and IE association of MS Outhouse Express.

You can easily remove those two programs, and they do stay removed if you do so.

Though it's incredible that you'd write "Very simple fix" when referring to installing a second OS as a "solution" to a problem with the other OS.

Abandoning the garbage that is the old DOS kernal is not a problem, it is a good idea! It was the cause of most 9x crashes. Of course programs written for an OS that is no longer in use are not going to be guaranteed to run well. The chains of legacy code have to be cut some time.