>Actually, not even once...we've found most users really do not like or use Help systems...it's only the top management that wants one :)

As a help author myself (for hire, by the way), this is a big problem. So many really terrible help systems have been foisted on poor users that the smartest of them have just given up. They're sick of seeing textboxes with captions like "DTN number", using What's This? Help, and getting "Enter the number of the DTN here." They're sick of help systems that describe the program, instead of answering questions about how to use it. They're sick of online documentation that's written by programmers who are not writers.

So when someone (err, like me) writes a really good help system, odds are that many people will never even see it, because they've been burned so often in the past.

We talk about this a lot on the WINHLP-L mailing list. It's a major problem, and only time and better help writing can solve it.