Not noticing that the back-up battery had failed (which I subsequently replaced) on my WIN 2000 desktop computer, on booting, the date was shown as being in the year 2003.

When I tried to start ViaVoice, it refused to recognise the speech recogniser and came up with all the usual warnings. Then noticing the date had changed to 2003, I rectified it, and re-booted, but still ViaVoice would not start. I tried reinstalling, Viacleaning, and Registry clear-out, but for some reason VV would not reinstall correctly, would not import the navigation macros, or install the default user.

I tried this procedure several times each with the same result.

After considering the problem for some time, I tried another solution by force-feeding ViaVoice into the computer.

I copied, from my laptop onto a memory stick, the ViaVoice folder, user folder and the following System 32 files:-

ibmwave.exe, roboex32.dll, setnote.cpl, setresuk.dll, shellses.dll, viavoiceps.dll, vtdft16.dll, vtdft32.dll, vtdmw.dll, VTuninst.exe, vvprodreg.dll, vvrtkclients.dll and vvrtkreg.dll (in VV 10.5 all dated 14th July 2004) .

I then pasted all of them into the appropriate folders in my desktop, re-booted, and lo and behold VV worked properly.

The funny thing was that DNS was not affected.

I am still befuddled as to what happened.

However I'm posting this for what it is worth to anyone who might have similar problems.

Quentin