BTW...

By the way, Standby is working again -- I did yet another System Restore, back about two weeks, and I reloaded Firefox, which was acting a little oddly. I have not reloaded StumbleUpon (I miss it!) nor have I reloaded Network Magic or Windows Defender. Basically, I want two or three days of flawless operation before I'll reintroduce those. And I'm not sure I'll get those days, either; I notice that that yellow shield with the Downloading symbol is there again. I had thought that perhaps the problem with Standby was that the system could not shut down because it was doing something it deemed critical, and this feeling was buttressed when I could not get it to accept a shutdown, either -- I ended up leaning on the power button to make it shut down. It was plausible that a download might be considered critical. When it came back, the yellow shield was gone, so I thought it might have been Defender (it won't tell me what it is!), but when I went to Standby again, I noticed that it had the cute little notice that there was a critical operation in progress. Finally, it did shut down, and I thought Well, thats over with -- and now it's back. Curiously, every time I see it, its at a different number, always higher, but retaining that number for a long time. Almost makes me wonder if somehow its waiting for the PC to be inert before continuing the download. Quite irritating, whatever it is. As to whether its the source of the problem -- I shudder to think.

The bread dough is slowly, slowly rising.