Thanks Chickenhawk. I don't have Textbridge, but I do have other OCR software that came with my scanner. All OK in that department.
Chcickenhawk and Don D Cake I am an early adopter of Zone Alarm and have had it installed in the previous incarnation of Win98 as well as this one. Hadn't thought of using it to see which progs might be trying to auto update through IE, though was well aware that ZA checked this kind of activity. Dohhh! Thanks for the tip.
MVH - will try StartupCPL as you suggested and let you know any progress - thanks for the tip.
Cheers all
AA