Our second Q & A of the week comes from Mark via email. Remember to try our friendly forums for help too.

Q: I run a home business in which I do graphic design and a small but crucial amount of HTML editing. Recently one of the programs I depend on to do my daily work has stopped functioning mysteriously on my main system. It gives me a cryptic error message (something about not being able to perform the operation) when I try to open a file, then hangs... only stopping the program from the task manager works. Everything else on this Windows XP system works fine. I've tried restarting the computer and reinstalling the program, but no luck. To top it off, this HTML editing software still works just fine on my laptop. I've been going crazy trying to figure out the source of this. Any ideas?

A: To be honest, the glitch could be from one of any number of causes; the most likely though, is that a recent Windows patch or update has disrupted your software. Assuming you are using the automated update service and keeping yourself abreast of current critical Windows patches (of which there have been several in the last few days) this is quite possibly the source of your problem.

The first thing you should check is if there is an update or more recent version of your program that you can download. This may well fix your issue, especially if the problem is due to a Windows patch.

Failing this, disconnect your system from the Internet, then go to 'control panel\add or remove software\' and check the 'show updates' button. Use the dropdown box to sort the list by date last used. Scroll down to find the most recent XP hotfixes. Remove them one by one, restarting the system and testing your software after each. Once you find the culprit, reconnect to the Internet and run Windows update and manually select and reinstall any benign hotfixes that you may have removed.

Stay alert for future updates to your software that may allow you to run it and maintain a fully updated system.