Dear User Group Leader:

Thanks for the great response to our call, over the last month or two,
for annoyances, gripes, and complaints about Excel and PC hardware. The
email we got was very useful and a lot of your members not only
sent annoyances, but fixes! As always, many thanks for the input.

This time around, we have yet another book in the wings--this one 
focusing
on Internet annoyances. Some of the annoying areas: Email (and spam),
connecting to the Net (via dialup, DSL, cable, configuration and all
that), wireless annoyances (from WiFi hassles to hotspots to fiddling 
with
WEP), web sites (namely creating, hosting, and maintaining your own web
site), browsing and browsers (Internet Explorer, Netscape, and others),
AOL, instant messaging, using search sites, security annoyances, and of
course, shopping and auctions.

Got Internet gripes/annoyances/kvetches? Send 'em our way by having 
your
members email me (marsee@oreilly.com) with "Internet Annoyance" in the 
subject line and we'll put our author on the job.

As thanks for sharing, we'll make sure to get copies of "Internet
Annoyances" sent to your group shortly after publication.

--Marsee


***

An example:

Pictureless Pages Predicament

THE ANNOYANCE: There are some great pictures available on the Web, but
certain pictures don't appear on web pages I visit. Instead I see a red 
X
or a funny little icon where the picture is supposed to be.

THE FIX: Several circumstances can keep pictures from appearing:

* There's a logjam at the web server or somewhere along the miles of 
wires
between the web server and your browser. Try refreshing the page (press 
F5 or click the Refresh button on the toolbar). But you probably 
already
tried that.

* Something's wrong with the web server. The picture might not be on 
the
server, or the programmer who created the web page might have put in 
the
wrong path to the picture.

* Internet Explorer may be configured so that it doesn't show pictures, 
a common setup for those with slow dialup connections who don't want 
to waste time downloading pictures. (If this option is set, you can
selectively display pictures by right-clicking the X or the icon and
choosing Show Picture.) To undo this setting in Internet Explorer, 
choose
Tools-->Internet Options. Click the Advanced tab, and in the Multimedia
section, check the Show Pictures box to make your pictures appear.

* An invalid value in the Windows Registry is preventing pictures from
appearing. It's an easy fix, even for those who are squeamish about 
poking
around in the Registry. (Before you mess around with the Registry, back 
it
up as per the instructions in the sidebar on page 47.) Select 
Start-->Run,
type in regedit, and hit Enter. In Registry Editor, navigate to
\HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\.gif. In the right pane, click the Content Type 
item;
its value should be image/gif. Then check \HKEY_CLASSES_ ROOT\.jpg;
Content Type should be set to image/jpg or image/jpeg. For more
information about this fix, see Microsoft Knowledge Base article 
307239.


***