My in-law's computer has been having problems lately. It is a cheap e-machines (this could explain it) box that I got for them at Circuit City. It is running WinXP Home and has 256Mb RAM (should be upgraded) and a 40Gb hard disk.

The performance of the box has slowed down considerably in the 12 months or so that they have owned it. I have defragged the hard drive and run Norton Windoctor to no avail. I am considering a complete re-install of WinXP, but I am hoping an upgrade to 512Mb RAM will improve things a bit.

I created two users in XP, one for my father-in-law and on for my mother-in-law, so they can separate My Documents directories, browser settings, e-mail settings and folders, etc. This has been nothing but misery since my father-in-law's userid has apparently become corrupted twice now. Everything is fine when my mother-in-law is logged on, but the PC goes to crap when my father-in-law logs in. I renamed his userid to Nobody and created a new one for him and that work for a few weeks, but now it is happening again.

Even when his userid was working there were problems. It took almost five (5) to log off and then log onto the other userid and load the few program in the startup list (Norton A/V, Zone Alarm, and a few other small things). So, now I am abandoning multiple users and forcing them to use the same id for now.

My problem now is how to move my dad's Thunderbird e-mail folders so they are accessible from my mom's userid, which they are both sharing now....