Thanks for the various suggestions. I have finally managed to solve the problem. As usual when something sounds like a hardware problem - it probably is a hardware problem. Whether the problem was dodgy serial ports on the motherboard, conflicts between the ISA i/o card and the sound card I don't know. What I do know is that after a day of messing around I got the mouse working (disabled on bord serial and floppy controllers) and used the ISA card. The ISA card had a floppy controller on it that may was causing problems with the on board controller. While this was giving certainly giving Floppy Device errors on bootup, it might also have been interfering with the serial ports (I have no idea as to why though) It took me another couple of hours to get the machine working as an X-terminal. I did spent several hours working out why the performance was unusably bad and eventually found a resource conflict between the network card and a sound card. Why did I put a sound card in a machine that will be used solely as an X-terminal? Buggered if i know. I do know this though... Human stupidity (mine) and computer hardware can waste your time. Aaron
