Sorry Owen about my delay in answering your post, but I was using my wife's machine to access the web; can you believe that her machine crashed too, I think with a u/s CPU.

However I have now solved the problem and my own machine is working just fine once again.

This KBDUS.DLL is one helluva problem, It is worse than the old days of working in DOS, except one has absolutely no idea why the computer cannot complete the start-up procedure. I only found out by using my original XP-Pro disk to try and solve the problem, when it arrived at the 'Windows is Starting Up,' stage, a blue screen announced that the file, ' kbdus.dll is missing, shut down the conputer.' Very, very uninformative, as I say much worse that Dos, which did sometimes give a clue, however briefly.

I then rang my daughter who also uses Winxp and asked her how many copies of the kbdus.dll were on her computer. She quickly came back with 'two,' and their locations. As I was able to get into my machine is 'Safe' mode, I discovered that I only had one copy in lower-case in Windows sys32. The other copy, in upper-case was in a i386 folder on the c:\ drive. For some unaccountable reason this folder had been automatically wiped from my computer.

I therefore created a 'new' folder 'i386' on the c:\ drive, shovelled in a copy of the .dll from the sys32 folder, changed the case to upper, fired up my machine and 'Eureka!' back in business.

Owen, for MS to introduce the new 'Vesta' system without completely sorting out xp beats me? Why I do not think they really ever sorted out Win 3.10.

However I do like XP and will soldier on until about the year 2030 when all may be well with Vista.

Thank you for your help.

regards

grimerz