For the last seven years i had operated a DIGI 001 on Win 98se with a negligable amount of problems, and no pop-ups (well...hardly any!) when browsing the internet...I'm currently doing some songs which need to be converted from PC to Mac format to be transferred and mixed elsewhere -and therefore i have been forced to upgrade my Pro Tools from v5.01 to 6.4 and also my OS too. I bought the PT upgrade, and reformatted my C: (program) drive to NTFS and loaded on Win XP Home, (plus SP2) and have kept my D: (audio) drive as FAT32. The change-over has gone okay - except that WinXP seems really unstable...i was very used to knowing all win98s internal stuff, and what was extraneous and deleteable etc..win xp has loads of extra crap it seems, and now I'm getting pop-ups by the minute and pro tools has lots of fatal exceptions occuring when closing the program...

any experienced users of XP have any tips on getting it 'settled down' - any recommendations on (preferably free) pop-up blockers/spyware and more importantly any help on reducing the amount of programs that keep occuring on start-up and those running in the background...there seem to be way more than win98 - i have tried win patrol to kill some, but it doesn't seem to do much.

sorry this email is a bit scatty, i've been at my computer backing up/changing system/updating drivers for days now and its driving me a little bonkers!

Any help/advice greatly appreciated.

Thanks, Phil