Ahhh, the Compaq 17xl265 presario 1700 laptop - nice unit! Just had a co-worker bring one in that was misbehaving badly - locking up & other such misdeeds. I noticed that Norton and McAfee were both installed and both non-functional, but both had loaded services and VXDs and were busily fighting for control of the box... I uninstalled both of them, having to manually hunt down and destroy the Norton AV registry entries, as it was a bad install, thus the uninstall didn't work completely. Also, the sound drivers were scragged - reinstalled from the Compaq download site.
After that, I installed AOL 8.0 per the users request, deleted AOL 5 and 7, and configured it for him, then reinstalled McAfee AV and updated the signatures as well. Norton is not supported on this laptop, from what the website said. Everything was working fine when it went home with the happy owner. I like that laptop - it was easy to use, keys large enough to be useful, screen crisp and clear, DVD/CD player worked fine, to the point of self-installing UDF drivers when I put in a CD-RW disk with data I wanted to put on the unit. I would consider getting one of these for myself in the future, if the price were right.