I'm following up on a thread from the other day that I've since deleted. The lister found that on closing certain programs, JAWS stopped speaking. The programs s/he named, as I recall, were MS Word and Outlook. Here's a belated suggestion. Instead of closing with alt-F4 or from within the file menu, go to the tasks list with alt-control-delete, put focus on the application and press alt-e. Perhaps this method of shutting down a program won't cause JAWS so much distress. This occurs to me because on my XP computer, I've noticed that even after I've closed Outlook, the system still keeps it going somewhere because the pings of arriving email keep on coming.