My computer is plagued with problems!
‘¢ When the computer starts the following message always appears: ‘Error Starting Program: A required.DLL file EZBWORDS.DLL was not found’. After clicking OK another message appears: ‘Error starting Program: C:WINDOWSSYSTEMSTCLOADER.EXE’.
‘¢ When attempting to open Internet Explorer by clicking the little blue ‘e’, the computer appears to be loading the program, but the IE Window does not appear.
‘¢ Constantly I must restart the computer as it always freezes. Loading is extremely slow and takes almost 5 - 10 minutes to start.
‘¢ The CD-ROM drive appears not to recognise disks.
‘¢ Sometimes the following message appears: ‘Kernel32. KERNEL32 caused a general protection fault in module USER.EXE at 0003:00003987′.
‘¢ When attempting to print the following message appears: ‘Internet Explorer Script Error: An Error has occurred in the script on this page. Line: 1174, Char: 1, Error: Unspecified Error, Code: 0, URL: res://c:WINDOWSSYSTEMSHDOCLC.DLL/preview.dlg. Do you want to continue running scripts on this page? Yes/No’.
‘¢ After typing the first couple of letters of a web address into the address bar, a long list of web pages comes up. How can they be deleted?
‘¢ What do Cc: and Bcc: in the address section of email mean?
‘¢ Finally, another message that often appears is ‘Mscnt: This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down. If the problem persists, contact the program vendor.’
A friend of my son has a disk that they claim will wipe and reinstall the system. Does this sound right, or is there more to it? The computer is IBM brand.

EZBWORDS.DLL seems to be an IBM specific file on your computer, but there is little further information on the file. So there isn’t much we can do to remedy this for the time being. The STCLOADER.EXE error you are receiving is something slightly more urgent. This is actually an adware program which is used to download and display advertisements on your computer. This was probably unknowingly installed when installing another program. We will need to edit the Windows registry. Be very careful when doing this as incorrect editing could cause Windows to become unbootable. Go to the ‘Start’ menu > ‘regedit’ and click OK. Navigate to the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionRun. In the right-hand pane, delete the value ’stcloader = %system%stcloader.exe’. For your information %system% is the path to your Windows system directory, comprising:
C:WindowsSystem on Windows 95/98/Me
C:WinntSystem32 on Windows 2000/NT
C:WindowsSystem32 on Windows XP.
Close the Registry Editor and restart the computer. Once the computer has restarted, go into the Windows Explorer and navigate to the %system% directory. Find and delete the file ’stcloader.exe’.

Your next two questions regarding Internet Explorer, the computer freezing and running slow are very broad and are difficult to fix. These problems could come down to simply too much being run on your computer at once. Let’s try to cut this down. Go to the ‘Start’ menu > ‘Run’ and type ‘msconfig’ (without the quotes) and click OK. This will bring up the System Configuration Utility. Click the ‘Startup’ tab. A list of all programs which load on startup are displayed. Untick all the non-essential programs you would not like to load on startup. Leave ‘SystemTray’ enabled as this is an essential Windows service. Once you are done click OK and restart the computer. Now, only the programs you selected will load at startup.

The Kernel32 error you are receiving is not good and another one of the things that I can’t really solve in correspondance. But we will come to a cover-all solution to your problems soon. This is the same with your CD-ROM problem.

Regarding your problems when printing from Internet Explorer, there are a few reasons why this problem could occur. These are outlined in the Microsoft Knowledge Base articles support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=293176 and support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=303360. These articles suggest extracting a new version of an Internet Explorer system file from the Windows CD. Unfortunately, this is a rather complicated procedure which would be difficult to carry out if you are not familiar with Windows. You may instead like to try the cover-all solution outlined below.

When you type in the web page address and the list of recently visited web pages appears, this is displaying your Internet Explorer history. There are two ways around this if you consider this to be a problem: either disable the autocomplete function for web addresses (this is the recommended solution in your case, as it will keep your IE history in-tact), or clear the Internet Explorer history. To disable the autocomplete, open Internet Explorer and go to the ‘Tools’ menu > ‘Internet Options’¦’. Click the ‘Content’ tab and then the ‘AutoComplete’¦’ button. Under ‘Use AutoComplete for’ untick ‘Web addresses’. Click OK. Then click OK again to close the Internet Options. Alternatively, if you would like to completely clear the Internet Explorer history, go back into the Internet Options and click the ‘General’ tab. Then, click ‘Clear History’.

The CC field represents ‘Carbon Copy’ and ‘Blind Carbon Copy’. You use the CC field when you would like to ‘copy’ (i.e. send) the email to another (or a few) email addressees so all addressees are aware of the distribution of the email. The BCC field allows the sender to maintain the anonymity of the BCC addressees - their addresses do not appear anywhere in the email received by the addressees.

The MSCNT file you are having problems with is actually a Trojan horse virus, which we will need to remove. Firstly, terminate the MSCNT process. Press CTRL-ALT-DEL and find MSCNT.EXE in the list of processes. Select the process and click ‘End Task’. Don’t worry if you can’t find the MSCNT process in the task list. Now, go to the ‘Start’ menu > ‘Run’ and type ‘regedit’ (without the quotes) and click OK. In the Registry Editor window, navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionRun. In the right-hand pane find and delete the value ‘Mscnt = %System%mscnt.exe /noconnect’. Now, navigate to HKEY_CURRENT_USERSoftwaremscnt and delete this key (a key looks like a folder and in this example has the name ‘mscnt’). Finally, navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionUninstallMscnt and delete this key. Close the Registry Editor and restart the computer.

You may find that now we have removed some viruses from your computer and also given it a general tune-up, by stopping non-essential programs from loading on startup, that some of the other problems may also be fixed. However, should problems continue (or get worse) your best bet is to format the hard drive and completely reinstall Windows. As your computer is a brand-name machine, it should come with a recovery CD which will automate this process for you. You should only use a manufacturer’s recovery CD, and never a third-party one (like your son was suggesting) as these will not work properly for most brand-name machines and will complicate the procedure no-end. Good luck!