Well, I broke down and did it. I had a Gateway with Windows98 on it upstairs so I decided to experiment by reformatting it first. It was a piece of cake, less than 1 hour to finish. Buoyed by that I decided to tackle my XP Dell. Not a piece of cake by any means. When I finally got it reformatted the **** modem would not work. 3 days of talking to Dell tech support people I could not understand, holding for 30 minutes or more only to get cut off, and going through the same steps the people before me had taken me through, I finally got a new modem and am back. (No applause please!
) Thanks to everyone who helped me. Everything seems to be back to normal. I hope no one sees me on this particular forum ever again!
Edit: Maybe I should be clearer. By this particular forum, I mean tech support