[Dandad]

I see I did not log out last night so please recognise that this "slow" response is the result of sleep not sloth.

Answering various questions that I have not yet addressed, or which have been raised since my last post.
CPU Athlon ~1211 (1200)
Average of 50% free resources
31Gb free disc space
The 300mb virtual memory I mentioned was a minimum setting which I had made when I first read the techie help tips. I have now changed to a 512mb minimum following suggestions here.

I have not experienced any problems with casting spells except a minor one of killing myself the first time I used Firedrop... OK and a few other times as well... I am presently in the Tomb of Heroes after finishing the Toad/Toadem quest and riding Champion the Wonderhorse all over the place.

I do not have any knives equipped but will experiment with this soon.

While not knowing anything about aspects of programming I nevertheless wonder if the spells and/or their effects are non-directional which might make them different to the arrows (and knives?) which are graphically targeted?

Another point, I do not have any Norton software. My McAfee has sometimes causes a few problems but I do not think it has anything to do with the present one, because it has occured with everything switched off except Systray.

Finally, I have considered the possibility that this error might be caused by issues specific to my machine. I have been running it for nearly two years and recently had to deal with a few corrupted files, e.g. lost Outlook Express and took an age to get it and settings etc back. But I have not had any problems similar to this particular one.