[bobman0330]

...but it sure would be nice!

This Tuesday, my A/C adapter for my laptop was stolen. I replaced it with a Targus charger. That adapter worked once. The next time I restarted my computer, it froze as soon as it got to the desktop. Task Manager revealed that quickset (a power management utility) was using something like 98% of CPU power. I killed it, no help. On restart, quickset was fine, but explorer.exe appeared to be frozen. No response from icons on the desktop, and an hourglass cursor whenever I moved the mouse over the taskbar. Couldn't open the start menu. I returned the Targus adapter and got one from the manufacturer. Same problem with explorer.

I finally came up with a partial workaround. On startup, I kill explorer.exe, then run it again from Task Manager. It still freezes up, but it gets far enough to configure my internet. Then, I kill it again, and start anything I need from Task Manager. I've installed a bunch of spyware detectors and AV software, but I haven't turned up any problems that would explain this. I really really really don't want to reformat. Any ideas?

I'm running a Dell Latitude D600, Pentium M 1.6, 512 MB RAM, WinXP Pro.

Thanks in advance.