Well, last night I decided to format my hard drive and reinstall Windows ME, simply b/c I think Dell loaded so much CRAP on my machine that the programs were conflicting w/each other. Games would freeze momentarily and start up again, etc. Anyway, I blew away EVERYTHING. Fdisked my drive into 2 partitions--C: drive contains 70% of volume and D: contains 30%. Formatted both drives after finishing fdisk. Made C: the active partition and began the install. After I finished, I noticed that everything ran SLOW! After installing my drivers and a few necessary programs, I began getting various errors--kernel32.dll errors and stuff (which I'm sure isn't good) Anyway, I figured I'd better defrag my drive so I started the defrag utility. It says that the drive contained possible surface errors and a full scandisk needed to be performed. Well, I went to bed last night around 2-3am and it's STILL scanning as we speak. What's going on ?? The disk Dell sent me is an OEM disk I believe--but it's still the full version of ME. Any suggestions? Should I install the retail version or will everything hopefully be OK after the defrag?