I sure appreciate all the help, you are all awesome. I loaded all the updates and new drivers. It seems to be working without the blue screen. I have not returned the startup/task bar to its normal mode thru msconfig. When I plugged in the external hard drive it made the sound of it recog. something and then the drive appeared. I also had to disable the "quick" option in the safely remove hardware feature to get it to allow me to disconnect the external hard drive. I have been wondering if this is all due to hot swapping the hard drive. Thats seems be be when the problem started, but i havent heard of others having this problem. The literature with the drive stated it was hot swappable.Thanks again for your quick resonse.