Windows XP itself uses 128MB of ram. So if you are experiencing slowness, upgrade your ram. Hmm.. on removing Windows Messenger, you should give Tiger J a PM or u2u. He knows how to do all of this stuff. In fact our direct connect hub is run on Windows XP Professional with all the extra softs stripped out of it. The computer is also a Pentium 3, so you can imagine how much it helped.