Some-one as old and wrinkled as you must know a few smarts, PP, so what is your Version of Windows? What was the last thing you did before it arrived? Did you upgrade somthing like a driver or a program? Add a new Prog? Can you undo what you did? Something has got corrupted - probably because a Windows DLL has been over-written by a third party DLL and it's incompatible with the rest of Windows
If you're on Windows ME (you wouldn't, would you?) or XP you can use the Restore function. It really is good.
And in XP if a driver update doesn't work you can use the "roll-back" function to revert to the previous version of the driver.
Only things I can think of without knowing more detail. Tell us some more juicy bits.
Bad Luck!
fob