I am receiving emails from Outlook Express warning that I am exceeding 90% of my email allowance. However, there are fewer emails stored within Outlook Express compared with previous times so I do not understand why this message appears. I thought that compacting the Outlook Express folders may resolve the problem, and Outlook Express has been prompting me to compact the folders each time I close the program. However, when I try to compact the folders a message appears saying “The folder is in use by Outlook Express or another application”. Can you advise whether compacting the folders will actually fix this problem, and what compacting the folders will do? The computer is running Windows XP. (more…)

There are a few problems which I have encountered when using Internet Explorer 8. First, it occasionally locks-up for no apparent reason. Sometimes this requires me to restart the computer, but other times it will come good with the message “Your computer has lost the lease to its IP Address 10.0.0.1”. Internet Explorer also locks-up when I am viewing certain websites and a prompt appears asking me to download and install Adobe Flash Player. When I activate the download either the computer locks-up immediately or when the Adobe download web page appears. In any case, I am unsure why I need Adobe Flash Player anyway. Another problem is that I am unable to clear the in the Google Toolbar. The “Clear History” button at the bottom of the list has disappeared so I am unsure whether this can be done. Finally, an unrelated question regarding a strange keyboard problem. When I press the SHIFT key for double-quotation marks the @ sign appears instead, and vice-versa. I have tried a different keyboard but the same problem happens. The computer is running Windows XP Service Pack 3 with McAfee Antivirus. (more…)

There is an ongoing problem with Internet Explorer 8 on my Windows Vista computer. When I first installed Internet Explorer 8 the Windows desktop would sometimes freeze, and a reboot seemed to be the only way to get things working again. I then ran some utilities, including a registry optimiser, which appears to have exacerbated the problem. As a result, I uninstalled and reinstalled Internet Explorer 8 several times. After these reinstallations the problem appears to have stabilised, as directly after a reboot I can always get into Internet Explorer 8. However, at some point afterwards the message appears saying “Unable to connect - Diagnose connection problems” which then tells me that nothing is wrong. Occasionally the entire screen will freeze as well. On opening the Task Manager there will be several “iexplore.exe” processes running and if I sequentially start closing these processes there is usually a brief pause and then everything suddenly unfreezes and the problem disappears (but can then reoccur later). That said, on other occasions this does not fix the problem and I need to restart the computer. How can I fix this frustrating problem? (more…)

Using Mozilla Thunderbird I can send emails perfectly fine, but cannot download incoming messages. The Thunderbird window simply displays “Downloading message 1 of 13” in the status bar with the envelope status icons in the system tray indicating that email messages are downloading. This has been happening for quite a while and presents a problem, since I cannot receive any email messages. It is particularly inconvenient because I use the internet for online shopping and ordering. The computer is running Windows XP and my ISP is OptusNet. (more…)

If the text of an email message which I am composing contains diacritical marks, or employs a non-Latin alphabet, the recipient of the message often will get something that is, at least partially, garbage with all sorts of odd characters (such as squares, dollar signs, etc.) appearing in the place of the diacritical characters. These undesired transformations can also happen when an unfinished message is saved as a draft and later recovered using my ISPs webmail interface. I am interested in knowing why this happens and how it can be avoided. (more…)