the reason I asked if you had a virus scanner on your system is becasue maybe the debugger may have taken some files the your virus scanner needed and it is freezing when it tries to load it or scan your boot partition. I know a few people that have winme and they have not had this problem. until you find the file it is freezing on it might just be safer to reformat or reinstall Me over previous one. I would go with the latter first. did your friend find his problem?