msie701.exe slows machine

I really enjoyed your anti-Windoze tirade - the one where the Linux machines could print, but all of the Windoze boxes could not. I recently "upgraded" my main home PC to a dual-boot Winblows 2000 & Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4. The W2K side seemed really slow whenever I was on-line (yes, I do indeed still use dial-up). I tried the same operation on a second W2K box that I have mostly for my wife's Ipod updates and my daughter's video games, and that was much faster even with a slower processor.

So, I went to Task Manager, and found msie701.exe sitting there. Funny, I thought, I am a Firefox only kind of guy, so what the $%^& was an msie task doing there. Needless to say, I could not 'End Process" as Access was Denied (Windoze machines are SO secure...), so i went for regedit. I found only one reference to the rogue exe, under a label REG_EXTEND_SZ. I bravely deleted it, and lo and behold, my machine was fast again. Now, my wife and I are not really bold Web Surfers (who would want to be, with dial-up and all?), so where does THAT little entry get into my Registry? We tend to go to the same few sites, do what we need to do, and get off.

Anyway, until I make the bold leap to high-speed, I am going to buy an old-fashioned Serial external modem, and do all of our Web/Email stuff on the Red Hat side. If the Windoze box needs any file off of the Web, I will transfer it via a 2GB USB stick (possibly one of the greatest computing inventions). I too, am sick of Windoze and all of its neediness. The only reason I will use it, is Kodak's EasyShare software is not available for Linux. I can download my pictures to the Linux side no problem with the Photo Tool, but the Kodak software has some nice editing bells and whistles. Oh, and by the way, I initiated a "chat" session with a representative from Earthlink (my dial-up provider), and got the usual "We don't support Linux" line. Fine, I will figure it out myself, and if I do need to change something, it will not be hidden from me.

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