Login ID specific behavior

I have a problem with my WinXp box. Sometime in the last week MSPhotoEditor started to hang in the process of coming up. I am running Office97. I tried unsuccessfully a number of things to fix it, including doing a system restore back to a day I had been successfully working with PhotoEditor. Playing around with the computer I found out that there were several broken .DOT's files and addon files all dating from the same time. I'm thinking that sometinhg happened to damage the DOT's and crowbar the process of bring up MSPhotoEditor. I thought it might be a virus, but I couldn't find anything. I cleaned up the broken DOT's and addin's, which helped Excel and Word come up, but nothing else. I also found that Adobe Photoshope Home Edition will take over a minute to start coming up (as if it were timing out).

Then I noticed that if I login as someone else, MSPhotoEd and Photoshop come up fine. I can't find any environmental variables that might be doing this. Is this something that can be cured by tossing the user data file? Any thoughts? I'm getting ready to create a different ID and start over using that (kind of like abandoning ship).

Peter

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Peter Cheimets
Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory ,__o-
Smithsonian Institution _-\_<,
60 Garden St. (*)/'(*)-
Cambridge, MA 02138 

pcheimets@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
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(617)495-7098      (FAX)
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