Up and Running, Sort Of

I've been having trouble with my computer lately. Well, several months, actually. Okay, for over a year or two. It all started when I bought some cheap piece of software (Print Workshop 2003) for doing some fun graphics projects. When I installed it, it installed over 1000 fonts on my computer. Already having 500-600 fonts installed, this caused a problem with having too many fonts installed (I'm running Win 98 SE). So, I got the number back down to 1003.

Now, the program didn't ask if I wanted to install these fonts, nor did it inform me that it was going to install them. Very poor design. Because of this, I removed the program. And for all it promised, it didn't actually deliver those things. At least it was only $5.

So, several of my programs, like Paint Shop Pro 7.04 (PSP) and several different FTP programs I was trying displayed odd characters in the dialogs. WS_FTP, in particular, was virtually useless as all of the messages just showed as boxes. I got some kind of error, but who can tell exactly what is going on when all alphabetic characters are rendered as boxes? At least I had an idea on what PSP was asking me, so I could get by (and version PSP 9 renders dialog boxes differently and works fine, except my machine doesn't always pop up dialog boxes -- I'm sure that's a Win 98/insufficient resources problem, not a corrupted font).

The worst thing the POJ (piece of junk) program did was replace my Marlett font. This is a system font that Windows uses to render fun things like the minimize/maximize/close boxes in the upper right-hand corner, check boxes and radio buttons (not rendered through Java or some such) in your browser and dialog boxes (real fun to try to figure out if a green squiggle means it's checked or not).

Anyway, a friend sent me a new Marlett font (I was assured that this font was responsible for all of my font woes -- both system and printing) to install on my system. I deleted my corrupted font and tried to install the new one. It bombed and told me the file was corrupt. So, for about three weeks now, I've had no real check boxes, radio buttons, or proper mini-icons. I didn't know where my system disk was to get the actual font. I found that yesterday.

Anyway, in an effort to do a little other cleanup, I wound up (accidentally) deleting my TCP/IP stack from my computer (Micro$oft sucks at directions, I tell you, even in later products). Then I remembered that I had forgotten my AOL password over 3 years ago (their web-based password reminder service stupidly only sends me my AIM password, even though I'm on their web-based email page. How stupid is that? Please, tell me), and I had read that you can get that problem fixed by trying to log in three times. I installed AOL (I only pay the $5 monthly to keep my email address there, not use the software), and sure enough, during the installation process, I saw a progress window about restoring TCP/IP. I would be able to log in again. (I had also lost dial-up networking in the midst of all this, and when I got that back, Micro$soft didn't think it proper to include a TCP/IP install.

So, anyway, I installed AOL and got my password reset; I can now log on without using AOL (they've provided more functionality in their software, less brain dead and all, but they still try to take over everything -- I had 8 icons besides the AOL program icon on my desktop, three processes that start up "in the background", and I now have Real Player on my computer again -- Yuck!!!). I also have the proper little icons and boxes everywhere.

My biggest problem still remains, though: when I print from Netscape 7.2, all alphabetic text prints as boxes (regardless of the font used on the page). Numbers and symbols print just fine. IE 6 printed just fine. If you have a clue on this, I would be more than happy to hear it. I've re-installed Netscape two or three times to try to resolve this, all to no avail.

I have another problem with my Netscape mail client: I can't use my Netscape email account any more. Back in Dec 2004, the program stopped responding to my requests to download email. This had happened intermittently before, so I just took Netscape web mail out and "reattached" to it. This solved the problem the few times this had happened before, but not this time. Now (and every few weeks when I try to reattach), it goes through the whole registration process, connects to all these different servers, but in the final step it fails and tells me that it is unable to connect to the server at this time. I have a modem manager running, which shows me activity. This last step does all kinds of things for about a minute, downloading about 300-400 Kb, then gives the error message. Netscape's basic response is that since I can see my email using their web-based client, there's no problem that needs to be resolved. I know it's all free software and storage, but still, shouldn't their own products work with their own other products? Is that too much to ask? The only saving grace on all of this is that Netscape web mail upped their storage to 250Mb from the previous limit of 5Mb.

This is still a major inconvenience for me. I like to store certain mails together on my computer (like jokes and devotionals), and I can no longer do this with anything that comes to my Netscape account. I have to forward it to one of my other two accounts. Eventually (a long time from now, of course), I will run out of storage space online. If anyone has a clue on this problem, I would appreciate any advice on the matter.