I reformat fairly often so it's not a problem. I just pop in the system discs and I'm back to a fresh from the store start. I only use this box for gaming so I'm not losing anything important when I do, it's just time consuming. I'm not sure what you mean by update windows. I run windows update weekly, but I have a feeling that's not what you're talking about. When I tried to fix the install errors I was getting I redownloaded windows installer and when I tried to install it I got the wrong os/version error. When I tried to fix the runtime error I followed the directions from the websites like this one I saw that for some reason I wasn't seeing what I should. I don't have a security tab for the installer properties window, and I don't have HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\InstallShield in my registry. Another thing, on this page it says that win xp already has the windows installer engine 2.0 and that I shouldn't have to install it. I'm guessing that's why I got the wrong os/version error when trying to install it but that doesn't explain why I got that error when trying to install games. As far as the last 2 archives, I think you're talking about the silent hill 3 download that was my first problem? Well, you guys gave great advice and I found and downloaded the rest of it, I extracted it and was all ready to install when I realized the install problem effected it as well. Unfortunately I deleted all the.r** files to make room for the extraction so I can't burn them to cd. At the moment I'm trying to burn the files I'd already extracted in hopes that I wont have to redownload that file. It took me several days to complete.