I want to place one stand alone computer in a public area that people can use to look for and view photographs. MS ACCESS, completely meun driven, will be the MEANS to locate and display thumbnail with a button to display a full sized photo. IrfanView will be the program to display the photos. In doing so, I do not want anyone to be able to do anything else, such as save or delete. Changing file property to read only does not prevent a deletion for HAPPENING. There is a program called DeepFreeze that will restore the computer to a certain state everytime it's rebooted. It won't prevent them from saving/deleting, but when there is a problem you can just reboot to restore the state.Another alternative, if you want to go with FREE utilities, is Microsoft's own SteadyState:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?familyid=d077a52d-93e9-4b02-bd95-9d770ccdb431&displaylang=en

Although SteadyState is being discontinued, it should work just fine for your purposes...You could use permissions to prevent them from deleting, ASSUMING you're using NTFS as the filesystem.Sid - your idea is probably the best one but I will try Killer255s idea also. When I tried to schedule the task a system ERROR resulted when I clicked the finish button with msg "Unable to establish existance of account specified". So one problem solved now I need to work on the other