thank you so much for your time and ideas edward, unfortunately it didn’t help :-(( i think this is beyond repair and im waiting on sony tech support to get back to me to acknowledge it.. i need to reinstall my XP or should i try to repair it somehow maybe? is there any alternative to system restore? . i dont want to lose my registry(dont even want to think about reintalling all the codecs, software, drivers etc)
cheers
seb