I make a habit of upgrading programs, and my machine, in general, as soon as I am aware of newer versions. In my Control Panel, under Add Remove Programs, I have older versions of these three system files. Is it required that the old versions stay on my machine? Can they be safely removed? Wouldn't an upgrade installation remove the older file? Part of the reason I am asking this is that, although I am running current version Internet Explorer 8, clean up scans, through a 3rd party application, continue to show registry errors naming Internet Explorer 5, 6, etc. Shouldn't any reference to those versions be gone from my machine? My system "hangs" from time to time and I wonder if this was cleared out I might have fewer issues. The XP is on my desk top. My new laptop had Vista and I upgraded to Win 7 myself. It is running great. I love it! I just can't replace my DT just yet. Thank you, in advance, for your help. Ed1 person needs an answerI do too

Hey Ed, Welcome to the Microsoft Answers community! The three programs you listed are components that many programs utilize when running. Programs are written to use a specific component as part of their programming. Here is an example: You need to install a program that utilized .Net Framework Version 2.0, but you already have .Net Framework 3.5 installed. You would still need to download the 2.0 version so that the program you want to install will work correctly. This is because the coding and rules of the .Net Framework are different between the 2.0 and 3.5 versions. To help diagnose the problem of your system hanging, I would suggest taking a look at your startup and services that are enabled on your computer. Old programs that you no longer use are often still loaded at startup which ties up system resources and can cause problems if the software is outdated/incompatible. Here are the instructions to restart your computer into a clean boot. This will only start Windows services, which will give you the opportunity to test if you still encounter any crashes. If you don’t then the next step will be to slowly enable the services/startup items you disabled during to clean boot to find which causes the hang when enabled. · Click Start · Click Run… · Type msconfig into the Open: field · Press Enter on your keyboard · Click Selective startup · Uncheck Load startup items · Click the Services tab · Check the Hide all Microsoft services box · Click Disable all · Click OK · Click Restart Now Once your computer has finished restarting, test to see if you encounter any crashes (this may take some time if your crashes don’t occur often). If not then you just have to identify which service/startup item was causing the problem. · Click Start · Click Run… · Type msconfig into the Open: field · Press Enter on your keyboard · Click the Services tab · Check the Hide all Microsoft services box · Check (Enable) the top half of the service boxes · Click OK · Click Restart Now Once your computer has restarted, again test to see if the problem is still gone. If so, then the services you enabled are good to stay. Repeat the enabling process for half of the remaining disabled services and continue this process until the problem returns or all services are enabled. If the problem returns then you will need to test the last batch of services you enabled one by one to find which was causing the problem to occur. If you enable all services and the problem still hasn’t returned: · Click Start · Click Run… · Type msconfig into the Open: field · Press Enter on your keyboard · Click the Startup tab · Check (Enable) the top half of the service boxes · Click OK · Click Restart Now Follow the same process as before, with testing after each restart. If the problem hasn’t returned, go back and enable half of the remaining list of startup items and continue the process until the problem has returned. Then you will need to test the last batch of startup items you enabled one by one to find which causes the problem to occur. Once you have identified which service/startup item causes crashes you will need to either disable/uninstall/update the program to avoid further problems. Hope that helps, look forward to hearing back from you. Steven Microsoft Answers Support Engineer Visit our Microsoft Answers Feedback Forum and let us know what you think

Hi Steven, Please forgive my delay in getting back to you. I assumed I still had no reply as I never saw anything in my personal email indicating someone had answered my question. So please forgive me, I do appreciate your help. It will be a day or so before I can examine your proposed solution in detail as we are busy packing for an urgent trip at this time. I am quite anxious to see what you have to suggest, try your fix, and then respond back to you as to how it went... From what I can gather though from quickly scanning your solution, I should NOT try to disable or remove the older three files in question, the Visual C++, SQL Server, and the MS NET Framework even though they say 2005. I do have the newer files also. I will check out the rest of your suggestion ASAP and get back to you. I've got some urgent family business to deal with first. Again, many thanks, Steven, Ed Young