cowgirl2- No, we're not humid at all! We are in the middle of our 'rainy' season, so it's a bit more humid out than normal, but we often go 5-6 months from April to Sept with only a sprinkle here and there and very low humidity...hence all the recent wildfires in Southern California. I suppose the lining would be retaining heat right now, but in the summer it would be more about retaining moisture. Lloyd, I checked out your page, and your pictures are amazing...you do have quite the set up!! The cardboard may be a good idea for both heat/moisture retention, depending on climate, as well as retaining my compost. I was a bit worried about that as well, luckygal, though I hadn't thought too much about critters carting off with things. I don't have a lid on it, so the contents are pretty wet at the moment, though I turned it yesterday, and it does appear to be decomposing in there. It's not hot inside, but it's a new bin and I'm still working on the balance of its contents and optimizing the bin. Idaho, is your lid clear/opaque?

IF you are using FireFox there is a very neat add on called "No Squint". I use it and don't have any problems anymore with too big or too small pages. When you set the page size to suit you using the - or + icon (that's on your tool bar when you download the add on), the page will stay that same size every time you go back to that page. I really like it.

Sue_va, that sounds like a mouse setting that is setting your screen to go blank, a sort of forced screensaver. You can probably turn it off in the settings somewhere. As for the "BSOD" as it's "lovingly" called, it's a little different than the true 9x BSOD but can still throw a person into a panic, especially if you're in the middle of a big project and didn't backup. There can be a lot of causes, some of which are corrupted files (very common), overheating (rare), memory parity errors (common), JOOTTs (it *is* Windows, so it definitely happens), failing hardware (rare), to name a few. Just having a lot of files, temp or otherwise is not really a cause, at least not often. It really doesn't make a difference if a file is temporary or not as far as the system is concerned in that way - a file is a file. Excess files and temp files can slow the system down a bit and increase boot time though. Heyjud, I'd highly recommend you do a thorough diskcheck on it to see if there's corrupted files. The Windows stop could cause some corrupted files and corrupt files can have a domino effect. I'd also run the antivirus *and* at least one or two good anti-malware programs. Check that your computer has adequate ventilation. If it's been a while it might need to be opened and have it's diodes dusted... literally. A little compressed air to blow out the dust. They're good air cleaners! The "compacting" thing on OE is not so scary as it seems. It's basically housekeeping and maintenance. OE, in Microsoft's almighty "wisdom" does not delete deleted emails. That's right, when you delete an email it goes to the trash, and you empty the trash, it's gone, right? Wrong. Mama Microsoft knows better, and it is good for tracing tracks. :) The deleted emails, though not visible are still on your computer tying up space. "Compacting" basically means deleting the mail you thought was deleted. By default it asks you about this every 100 shutdown attempts as I recall. Something like that. One or two cautions, though: Be sure to BACKUP your email first. Things can go wrong. And they often choose the worst time and problems develop all too often on the most valuable stuff! Next, when you let it compact, it will likely take a while. Do *not* interrupt it while it's doing its thing. You don't want email coming in so go "offline" so it doesn't check for mail. Once finished you may likely see an improvement in the performance of OE. After you do this, it's also a good time to defrag your system if it freed up a lot of space your hard drive could become fragmented. Speaking of not backing up... how about the time one of my customers had one of our new systems. They asked for a rush and to not bother with burn-in, that they'd do it. They're a large machine shop and do a lot of custom work. They were in the middle of a big project, didn't back up for over a month, estimated the value of the work at over $10k and the hard drive died. Nope, no backup. I wasn't even going to attempt a data recovery on that one, sent it to a big outfit. Nothing recoverable. Did they learn a lesson? I doubt it!

Thanks Claire for that update. Always good to understand what is going on. I'm not understanding why they have truncated content, only to have to turn around and undo it. Sounds like they've created a lot of work for themselves. Unless they are trying to save space needed to store all the content and this way they only have to restore what people notice and complain about? I was reading in the Kitchen forum, that they truncated all the older threads on 'kitchen reveals' and removed the photos from the threads. The forum members brought it to their attention and so far they are restoring only a set # of photos to each thread. In one case, losing 73% of the photos and in another 90% of the photos. I don't understand that kind of response either. In the case of Galleries, I don't think 'bumping it up' to the top of the forum posts, is an adequate solution. I would hope they are planning to make the correct adjustment at some point. I notice that they are still not keeping unanswered threads at the top of the 'All Topics' page, but haven't noticed yet, whether the same is true on each individual forum.