The notice reads: "Your computer does not have enough available memory to
complete this task. If any other programs are running, quit one or more of
them, and then click OK."  I've tried the safe mode with only IE running, no
luck. I've run in normal mode with IE and system tray (avast antivirus
disabled, screensaver disabled), no luck. The computer has 384MB RAM memory,
and System Resources says that 392,648KB of physical memory is available.
System Resources says that  resources are 39% free, and GDI is 51%. I don't
know enough to know what any of these figures really signify, but I thought
they might help. Also, since the safe mode always takes me to Help & Support,
I run scandisk from the help menu, scanning files and disk separately. There
are almost always file errors, which scandisk fixes automatically. It's been
a very long time since the disk scan has indicated any errors at all on the
disk itself. It has said "no errors found" for a long time. I had to do a
System Restore on April 21 (to repair problems caused by the Windows Update
MS06-014KB 911562). It made Help & Support unaccessible, as it did,
apparently, for many other people as well . The restore went fine and cleared
away the problem. I believe that I ran the scandisk successfully at least
once after that (am almost certain), but could the restore have caused some
anamoly? The computer has no virusses (haven't had an infected file in a year
and a half), and otherwise actually runs pretty smoothly with reasonable
speed. If it weren't for the loss of help support from Windows and access to
security updates in July, I probably wouldn't want to mess with it with an
upgrade. Any, probably way more than you want to know, but I thought a bit
more information might lead you to an
assessment. Thanks a great deal if you've taken the time to read this far to
help a stranger.

Tom B.