>Hi,
>
>For my sins I still have the 'Start Page' loaded by default in the VS IDE. Every morning I get the 'Updating the news channel....' message on startup. Seems to me it's been wasting its time for the last 6 months - there doesn't appear to have been any new content since last March!

Viv,

The top of my list shows : Free ebooks available for download - sep 22, 2008

Have a look at: Tools | Options | Environment | Startup
What is it set to on the right ?

I have
At startup: show start page
Start page news channel: http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=45318&clcid=409
Download content : every 60 minutes