Solution appears to be holding...ran check disk

Running check disk seemed to solve the problem.

Thank you so very much for having taken the time to advise. It appears that the check disk command worked. It will take a while to fathom your other suggestions, which I shall mull over in due course.

On previous occasions, I watched the systray carefully, and the offending bug seemed to load at the same particular time in the sequence of other progs that I have loaded to that effect. There was a logic to the sequence, which leads me to believe, that "somewhere" in the registry there is a purposeful key organizing this loading sequence.

Therefore, where in the registry, is the list of commands and paths advising explorer to load certain start up programs, and in which order? One should be able to "visit" that location and note which progs are in the "train" and then be able to zap the offending ones, in order...and via the process of elimination, isolate the offending program.

This may be a faster method than trying to second guess the dll issue. I had 98 MS dills active at the time, along with about 25 "others." And everything was working fine...save for that ghost!

P/S ... I use "RestoreIT" which I highly recommend. I totally deleted it from my system, before rebooting and after again debugging in Process Explorer, just in case it was the culprit for continuing to "renew" my bug issue upon every reboot.

Thanks again...