I've found that using phpbb on a regular web hosting service works very well.

This is going to be maintained by various volunteers with random levels of competence who will run out of time or lose interest and be replaced by others. I intend NOT to be technical support - but will probably not win that fight. Does generic hosting make sense for those circumstances?

Hmmm... once phpbb is installed (and it isn't very hard to do), there isn't really a lot to do to keep it running and the administrative tools are all web GUI stuff. My phpbb boards have been pretty small affairs though.

Well - suspect this will be too.

Ok. My laptop is being stupid. Internet Explorer does not want to load, and like an idiot, I don't have another browser installed. I don't think it's a virus, 'cause I ran my virus check. It's not the ISP, 'cause Emily's computer works. Any ideas on how to get a copy of IE to try to reinstall?

The easiest would be to reinstall from a download from Microsoft. What verion of IE do you have? If IE 6, click this [link] .

And, if you have XP with Service Pack 2, you might consider IE 7 beta 2. Betas aren't for everyone, but there it is.

The problem is, I can't download anything on that computer, 'cause it won't load. Can I download and burn to CD?

Nebbermind. I downloaded it on a network computer and tried that. It didn't work, because it's actually an older version than is already on my computer. So, I downloaded Firefox. That seems to be working fine. But, the computer is still slow and whatnot. So, now I'm running spybot. We'll see. I think I'll run the virus checker again too. Something is definitely strange.

vw, what OS does your laptop have? If Windows, I'd check the Processes tab of the Task Manager to see if anything's sucking all the CPU usage. If it's a Mac, you can use the 'top' command from a terminal window (ask me how if you don't know) to do the same thing.

I've got Windows XP Professional.