Frank,
There is an update for Windows ME that might help.
Dave, sounds like your Systems Resources are overworked. You might check in that little tray on the bottom right (probably) of your screen and see what all is running. Also a lot of programs don't fully close all files when you exit them and if your computer has been on for a long time, and you have opened and closed a lot of stuff, these resources can be so tied up that nothing works.
Right-click My Computer, then Properties, then Performance. Under System Resources it will show the percentage that is free. If it gets below 30% or so, you need to close some programs, or reboot, or close some of the stuff running in the background. Control-alt-delete will show you everything that is running.
Maybe this will help.
DonM

There are Windows applications, such as the notorious Excel spreahsheet program from Microsoft, that do not release / recycle the physical memory back to system memory pool even after they have been terminated. We call this memory leak. To handle memory leak problems, there is a very effective small freeware program available for Windows 95/98/NT (I do not know if it supports Windows 2000 and ME yet) called Ram Page. After installing the program and activating it to run on your Windows status bar, double-clicking the numeric Ram Page symbol will free up a certain configurable chunk of memory (excessive use of Ram Page is not recommended though) for your system to work more effectively with memory. You can download Ram Page utility freely from the following site:
http://www.jfitz.com/software/RAMpage/index.htm

I have used this program for quite a long time and have found it very useful. I am sure Uncle Dave will probably want to have this utility installed on his older laptop once he has its problems corrected.

Paul Ip
from Texas