By the way, does anyone else remember the episode called "The Doll" that featured a scary porcelain doll with fangs and Tammy Faye Bakker eyelashes?

Yes, I saw this one quite recently. It was just this side of horrifying, that doll. Its voice was enough to give me the heebie jeebies. Probably one of the scariest episodes ever of Night Gallery.

--Mark

Best wishes Gerard; will be thinking about you. Glad to hear that things have gone well and that no nasty aliens popped out unexpectedly.

--Mark

I miss the green. It was so purty.

--Mark

MB -- It's not a Cleaner issue per se; I could disable the Cleaner and QTTask.exe would still load into the startup routine, the difference being that I wouldn't be alerted to the fact until the next time I started the computer. The Cleaner sounds an alarm when a registry or system file is altered (in this case the startup routine), which can happen if a Trojan gets into your system.

Similar to this situation, RealOne Player loads a file called evntsvc.exe (unless you get rid of it) into the startup routine--but it does it every time the player is loaded, either for something on the Web or from local drives. Here's its description from www.answersthatwork.com:

"RealPlayer Classic used to be one of the most needed pieces of software on a PC. Its successor, RealOne Player, is vying for the title of the most hated piece of software. For a start, on many PCs EVNTSVC slows down boot-ups unacceptably, using up to 90% of CPU time at times.  There have also been reports of EVNTSVC dropping advertising shortcuts onto the desktop during idle times.  Next, if you try to disable EVNTSVC via Startup Manager or MSCONFIG, RealOne Player checks to see if it has been deleted from the Registry and re-instates it as a startup item! To be fair, there is a facility within RealOne Player to "only perform automatic services while RealOne Player is in use". As stated in our write-up for RNDAL, our recommendation is to de-install RealOne Player and either use the classic RealPlayer, or something else such as WinAmp. If you absolutely want to keep RealOne Player, we suggest you rename EVNTSVC.EXE to EVNTSVC.EXE.OLD as that is the only way to make absolutely certain that it never runs, and RealOne Player works fine without it."

The part I put in bold above appears to be what's happening here with QT, although I don't think QTTask.exe does anything more than load the icon into the task bar tray. I don't use QT all that frequently, and I don't remember precisely when it was last updated. But mine is the free version, not the paid version, with the bells & whistles. Dunno if this makes any difference.

--Mark

Bobubas informed me that the MSWord file of Chapter 19 was truncated, so I have replaced it with a correct file. If you happened to download that one before 6:00 p.m. EST this evening, you might want to go back and get the proper file.

--Mark

There are probably a few ways to disable it. But the easiest is probably to go into your Control Panel, double-click the QuickTime icon, and then uncheck the box next to "QuickTime system try icon".

I didn't explain that quite well. QT is set NOT to have a system tray icon. Coming to the DS page turns overrides my local config, thus necessitating the steps in my previous post. I've never had a Web page do that before, and I can go to other QT locations and it doesn't do it. It seems to be peculiar only to this site.

--M

I removed the Web pages a while back to free up some room in my FTP space.

The original MS Word documents can be accessed at http://public.webbox.com/628627. Note: The chapters do not appear in order in the list on that page.

Also: Below the chapter listing, you'll see a coupla photos labeled DS Old House; that's a house in my old hometown that I always thought woulda made a helluvan Old House.

--Mark