>>>>Hi everybody,
>>>>
>>>>I have a problem in one of the forums I'm often visiting. For some strange reason I see an absolutely blank page with the message done in the status bar. It happened just 2 days ago. I didn't change any settings of IE. Several other people experience the same problem. The forum works fine in Netscape or Opera (I don't have them at this computer). What could be the reason? Forum is written in Perl.
>>>>
>>>>Thanks a lot in advance.
>>>
>>>I found another forum with the same problem: http://israel-forum.org/
>>>
>>>Could somebody please check this forum in IE? I see a completely blank page.
>>>
>>>P.S. When I clicked on the 2 days icon to find this message, it was not displayed. I believe, I saw "missing" threads before. I have to go to this message from my account.
>>
>>Nadya,
>>
>>The page comes up (in Cyrillic), but it looks OK to me. I'm using IE6. Sorry, not very knowledgeable about ways IE can go wrong. If it's not a font issue, maybe some firewall setting is blocking it? Good luck.
>>
>>Mike
>
>Mike and Jim,
>
>Thanks for checking the link. The strange thing is that in the Sunday evening I was able to access both sites just fine. They work today as well. I don't know, how to explain this temporary unaccessibility...

Well I must say that I find internet "transactions" to NOT be 100% reliable. From time-to-time I get oddities and I generally find that trying again later "fixes" the problem.

Personally, I think that this is a TERRIBLE state of affairs, but more and more of us are being brainwashed into simply accepting things like this as a simple fact of life. I'm speaking here of anything from dropped clicks (IE evidences the click by sound and possibly by image change, yet nothing happens) to wrong counts of things (like Windows Update reporting 3 non-critical changes available one time, then 9 (the correct number) the next time, to 'page not available' one time yet available next try right away (or sometimes a few minutes later) to a blank page coming up to....

My concern is that the internet is becoming used for more and more CRITICAL stuff including possible LIFE-THREATENING things. For example I know that robots controlled by doctors miles away using the internet for control are now being developed (and actually being tested as I write). Imagine the click ordering the robot to STOP CUTTING gets 'dropped' and in the next second a major artery is snipped!!!

We insist on perfection when it comes to microprocessors and many other things in life, yet as software in general gets more and more flaky (Word 2003 has ALL the same bugs as Word97 PLUS several more) we simply accept it and shrug it off. Mainly, I suppose, because we have no REASONABLE PLACE where we can complain and get action.

In other words... patience is demanded and it is only getting worse.

Jim