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This is in response to Al Lowe’s problem with his window focus. It occurs to me that he might have inadvertently set his environment to resemble the old UNIX windows setup, where just mousing over a window selected it. That feature is still available in Windows 7, under “Control PanelEase of AccessEase of Access CenterMake the mouse easier to use” It doesn’t indicate that there are any hot-keys that might activate it accidentally, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any…

I purchased Applian Replay Capture Suite, and have been pretty happy with it. The only site I wanted that I haven’t been able to pull video from is BBC. It’ll also do basic video editing, and convert from almost any to almost any other format.

A handy site for your toolbox is:

http://www.adobe.com/software/flash/about/

If you visit it with each of your browsers, it will tell you which version of the Flash player plugin is installed on that browser. Look underneath the splash advertising, to the right. It should say, “You have version ___ installed.” If you see no splash, you either have an ancient version, or no Flash player at all.

This way, when a random site says you need a new Flash player, you can go to the source and confirm that they’re correct, or know that something else is the problem.

I get the “need a Flash player” occasionally on new sites that I haven’t authorized to run scripting yet

Jon,

Try stuff *in this order*:

1. Uninstall T’Bird again
2. Delete any remaining T’Bird folders – both the program location and where email is stored (I’m at work right now, so I can’t give you the firm paths)
3. Run CCleaner twice – once on the normal tab, once on the registry tab. Go ahead and make the registry backup, when it asks.
4. Reboot
5. Reinstall T’Bird
6. Restore your mail folders

If you still have trouble, I’d download sysinternals’ autoruns program, and see just what the heck is set up to run on your computer.

~ Rosanne

I use Thunderbird 2 with four add-ons: Lightning (full-featured calendar that imports/exports as .ics or .csv, and will sync with Google’s calendar; Buttons! (enables certain button behaviors that I want – like going back to the inbox when I delete an email window); MoreFunctionsForAddressbook (adds some fields and features); and Contacts Sidebar, which does what it says.

I like that I can monitor multiple email AND newsgroup subscriptions with it. I also like the ease of backing up and moving or copying files to new machines. The default setup is good for 90% of users, and it can be tweaked easily by the other 10%.

I haven’t switched to Thunderbird 3 yet, because I found it somewhat buggy in the way it handles addresses, and they’ve only recently come out with a Lightning beta calendar for it. I was kind of surprised they released it final in such an unpolished state. I had a hellish time rolling back, and T’Bird is usually much easier to handle than that. Part of it’s my fault. I didn’t realize that it was such a sea change, and I only backed up a couple of my content files – not the full folder backup that I usually do.

I’ll be switching in a few months, once it’s a little more stable.