thanks richard for all your help,i have the deaktop pc and my wife has her laptop pc with the same windows vista premium 32-bit, so i took a flash drive, copied her windows media player shortcut, opened program files, pasted in media player, then right clicked media player and moved the shortcut to desktop, and it worked, what a happy feeling,i am glad i took your advise and didn't go the way of factory recovery so thanks again and appreciate the time you spent resolving the problem,patch41.