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One is a three year old Dell, the other (mine, the more impacted one) a five-year-old Gateway. I replaced my hard drive about 18 mos. ago and did a clean wipe-and-install-fresh (which took months to get completely squared away. Drivers!) when upgrading to Win XP. Neither under warranty at this point.

I’ve tried everything anyone has suggested. Nothing works. This is also a problem on my husband’s Dell, which is newer and has far less software and is mostly just used for email, Web, and Word documents. I also can’t access msconfig or other system adjustment places on my machine anymore, though I could when I started all this. As with the search function, you click “run” and put in msconfig, and click OK, and everything purrs for a second, a DOS window appears and disappears instantly, and nothing happens after that. I am returned to the desktop.

Our two computers are on a small peer-to-peer network, with a router and firewall. Virus scans are consistently negative and we keep Norton up to date, both the software and the virus files. Help!

I did that. Made no difference at all. Got any more things to try? Thanks for the Kellys-korner tip, by the way. I’ll add it to my resource list.

I was having this problem also, with IE rather than Netscape. The problem is solved deep in the bowels of the IE discussion group, and it’s XP’s fault. The solution can be found at:

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsxp/expertz…ust/cosden1.asp%5B/url%5D

Be sure to make both the changes mentioned when you get to that remote connections manager properties box.

Woody should really mention this in the XP column as it seems many people are troubled by Windows XP making unnecessary attempts to dial a connection when a persistent cable or DSL connection is already present.

Edited by WyllyWylly to add URL markup

Hooray for you, MRUCKER! Not for all the code, most of us find that pretty useless. But at the end of the message you gave the link to the MS instructions for fixing this problem in XP. At my house we thank you. Both our computers, connected by cable modem to the Internet, offered to dial up every few minutes. We went in and clicked the “never dial a connection” boxes (the one in IE and the one in the Internet Options control panel) a dozen times a day. And a dozen and one times a day, the boxes unclicked themselves and shifted without any human assistance to “dial when no connection is present” and for some reason XP thinks there is never a connection present. Although there always is. There must be others out there with this problem, I wish Woody would feature this fix in his XP column sometime. And thanks again for passing it on.

Thanks, this was the answer. I don’t understand how settings come undone in Outlook, but they seem to do so from time to time. No one else uses this machine, and I certainly didn’t go in and uncheck that box! I have always gotten reminders and never knew there was an option to turn them off, other than not to set reminders for specific tasks or meetings.

When I upgraded to Windows XP, the encoding problem went away. Apparently it’s some little incompatibility between IE6 and Win 98.

Sorry to be so uninformed, but what exactly do I do with the registry setting? I presume I copy it somewhere, but where and how?

By the way, here’s a really wierd effect that has been completely replicable on my machine – it now happens every time! When I use my bookmark for MS Knowledge Base, I get a no-graphics view and text telling me that the site is temporarily unavailable and I should come back later. When I change the encoding back to Windows, the page redraws with full functionality as well as graphics. In each search result page, I see no results until I change the encoding, then the list of results springs up.

Didn’t know I had a regional setting in the control panel! It is set at English-United States.

That’s correct, I downloaded MSIE6 directly from Microsoft.

I’ve tried turning Auto-select on and off. It doesn’t seem to affect the problem. It selects the western european ISO whether it’s supposed to auto-select or not. I believe that auto-select is only activated when the web designer leaves encoding information off the page entirely; in this case, IE6 seems to be reading the information wrong, and seems to be doing it for a number of people because there are more posts than mine describing the same problem.

No, I do not have either cookie control or ad control software of any kind. Except what is built in to IE 6-

This is exactly what I’m experiencing. Each time it happens (most pages) I check view:encoding and find that Western European ISO is checked instead of Western European Windows. When I check Western European Windows, the page reloads correctly. But the next page it starts all over again. How to make the browser read the encoding correctly?? Netscape is not doing this, so it’s not the sites.

I don’t use Yahoo. I’m having this problem throughout the Internet: Egghead, ZDnet, Microsoft, you name it.