Hello folks - Two silver surfers here at a complete loss. We got our computer from Dell. Its says on the owner's manual it's a Dell Dimension 2400 series. It's Windows XP - our anti virus thingy is 'avast' and there's an icon for 'malaware' as well, which our local computer shop has put on for us. We've got nothing unusual on it - we don't even download music or stuff. Anyway, tonight we got a prompt, ( a yellow shield), for an update. I wouldn't have clicked on it, but Him Indoors clicked on it. It's taken several minutes to do its thing, then it said it had been interuupted and was restoring the system. So we left it to do whatever it was doing - now we 've got a blue headed message from Microsoft Windows, and it says - ' the system has recovered from a serious error - a log of this error has been created - and at the bottom, it says 'send error report' or ' don't send' . We've clicked on both buttons and in the past, it has always just reported the error to Microsoft and then we click' cancel ' and it goes away. BUT .... now it won't go away. !!! The old fella has tried everything, he's turned the computer on and off at the mains, we have pressed control alt and delete - nothing happens. We can't get rid of the little blue panel. We would very much appreciate any suggestions from some of you computer whizz kids. Ta very much.