I’m having a problem with cookies. My ISP is Optusnet and they offer a personalised home page where you can select your own news, sport, weather etc. To take part you have to register (free) and they give you a password and off you go and personalise your home page. My problem is that when I sign on to personalise my home page I either get the Sign In page back or the standard (non-personalised) home page. I have tried deleting all my cookies in case they are corrupted but the problem still persists. My cookies are enabled in Internet Options but they are not ending up in the ‘Cookies’ folder but going to the ‘Temporary Internet Files’ folder and are not labelled as Cookies. When I access my account from work I have no problems with it and I can make changes to the homepage at will. I have tried copying my cookies from the work computer and saving them at home in the Cookies Folder but that made no difference. I am running Windows 98, Internet Explorer 5.0.

As you can access and personalise the home page from your work, we can assume that the problem has something to do with your home computer. You are correct in saying that this problem more than likely has something to do with cookies. Let’s do a test to see whether the problem is something to do specifically with cookies from the Optusnet page, or a problem with all the cookies on your computer. Go to another site which offers a similar service to the Optusnet personalised homepage such as My AltaVista (live.altavista.com). Sign up for this service, close down your browser, delete all of your cookies, and open your browser again. Go back to the My AltaVista website and log in now. If you log in and manage to modify the page, then the problem is more than likely confined to the Optusnet cookies or something to do with the Optusnet site. In which case, you will need to take up the problem with Optusnet.

Should you be having the same problem with My AltaVista as with Optusnet, the problem looks like it is concerned with all Cookies on your computer and not just limited to the Optusnet cookies. This is an interesting problem and I have not come across anything like this before. As the cookies end up in the ‘Temporary Internet Files’ folder we can assume that your computer is receiving them. However, the cookies should also be in the ‘Cookies’ folder. This is because the cookies stored in the ‘Temporary Internet Files’ folder are just shortcuts to the real cookies in the ‘Cookies’ folder. You can see this by deleting the cookies in the ‘Cookies’ folder and then trying to open the cookies in the ‘Temporary Internet Files’ folder. You will not be able to open them and an error will occur which states it cannot find the source file. So I firstly suggest that you make sure that your computer is set to accept cookies. To check this, open Internet Explorer, go to the ‘Tools’ menu > ‘Internet Options’, click the ‘Security’ tab, and click the ‘Custom Level’ button. Make sure that cookies are enabled in the ‘Settings’ dialogue.

Another reason why the cookies are going to the ‘Temporary Internet Files’ folder rather than the ‘Cookies’ folder, could be that the location has been set incorrectly in Internet Explorer. Go back into ‘Internet Options’, click the ‘General’ tab, and click the ‘Settings’ button in the ‘Temporary Internet Files’ area. In the window that appears, make sure the current location for the temporary internet files is ‘C:WINDOWSTEMPORARY INTERNET FILES’ (or alike) without the quotes.

If you still are having problems, make sure that you are not running any programs in the background which could be deleting or refusing Cookies as they are sent to your computer. Finally your next to last resort would be to upgrade to Internet Explorer 5.5. You can upgrade via the internet (although be warned the program is large to download) or you can find Internet Explorer 5.5 on the cover CD of most computer magazines. And if you do this and you still have the problem and you really want to have the functionality of cookies, then download and use a new browser such as Netscape (www.netscape.com) or Opera (www.opera.com).