K18NEO - this is basically as far as I have got with it. I haven't installed anything from HP but the only thing that occurs to me is that the version of XP I installed is a DELL corporate one. I wonder whether it came packaged with some HP software on the assumption that the machine it would be running on had some requirement for it. The PC is newly built by me and has nothing at all to do with DELL and no scanner etc.

There is no HP software visibly on the machine, and nothing that mentions Open Mail and I certainly haven't installed anything. So my question is simply which XP service will run OMSCAN? At the moment the service tries to run each evening at 18.59 (info from the Event manager) which means the system crashes at that time each evening and then several times after that as it must be set to retry so many times after a failure. Its a right c*nt.