>I could have sworn at the .NET release conferences MS said that ASP.NET would detect the browser and generate it's pages code based upon the capabilities if the client. Is that incorrect? Are there components of ASP.NET that will simply not work in any browser but IE5?

Yes, probably the new CLR controls. (Netscape never added ActiveX support to their browser - it was done by third-party, which is now out of the business)

As there is (yet) no support for this (CLR) components in all of the browsers, you will be not able to create "fat" web-pages that are supported by old browsers (and/or) follower browsers. Today the picture on the "web-browser front" is totally different from the one before 2 or 3 years - AOL (Netscape) and Opera Software suffer a bitter defeat. Maybe we will hear more from their browsers... but I am not sure that they have big chances as for browsers on the Windows platform where Microsoft is not only monopolist, but technology-leader.

Kind Regards