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Compiled by PETER SINCLAIR

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Can anyone help Terry Mitchell out? "At the beginning of the year I signed up with AllAdvantage.com (Get Paid to Surf the Web). After a month I decided to unsubscribe. Now, whenever I turn my computer on, a box appears with "Advert Bar Authentication" along the top superimposed over a screen called "Untitled-Paint. The bar will not respond to OK or Cancel, nor will either of them respond to the X in the top right corner. The only way to get rid of them is Ctrl-Alt-Delete. The "Close Program" box appears with the Untitled Paint highlighted, I click 'End Task', another "Advert Bar (Not Responding)" box appears, and after clicking 'end task' in that box everything finally disappears. How can I stop all this happening every time I turn on ."

Ouch. I've always thought All-Advantage a bit dodgy and steered clear of it myself - I suggested using Add/Remove programmes in Control Panel to get rid of it, or maybe removing its icon from the Startup folder in the Programme menu. Terry says that doesn't work either - anyone else been stuck with this? If so, please help the poor guy out over at the "your net" InBox forum.

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Gill Partt recently downloaded Outlook Express 5 and IE5 from the windows update site [http://windowsupdate.microsoft.com] to find his spellcheck would no longer work on OE, while still working perfectly in other apps. A listener to NewsTalk1ZB rang me with the same problem a week or two back, so it's obviously something going round.

Once again, Microsoft's invaluable Richard Burte rides to the rescue with support at: http://support.microsoft.com. It might also be an idea to make sure your English version [American, UK, Australian or New Zealand] is selected correctly.

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Richard Lamb needs good text-recognition software to scan documents that may not always be perfectly printed, or in which the fonts change in size and style.

It's generally accepted, Richard, that text-recognition is still [like handwriting recognition] often a fairly hit-or-miss affair. The best software available is probably Caere's OmniPage Pro 10 – it's the one I use, and I can usually persuade it to do its thing [$499 incl. GST from Global Computers.

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Links:

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