Thanks for that info, but it is not just the office install, i am doing this for a friend, on his gateway, after i did the install for him when he took it home,and tried to load aol upon the reboot he got the halted ptvcd error so isugessted to him to uninstall aol which he did but still could not boot up, so i got the system back and tried everything, reinstalled clean, from format windows worked fine i installed aol 6.0 same thing happened, not even the same disk so I know that the disk is not the problem tried a system restore, selective start up through msconfig , reloaded clean again this time i tried it with office 2000 upon restart same thing happened same error message, clean install again works fine for now nothing else installed. What is the device? that is failing, i think it is video what can i do to install other programs