500th Post and I am pulling my hair out in big clumps

I worked in technology for 25+ years and do not consider myself an ignoramus. Maybe I'm wrong. In late fall, I downloaded Internet Explorer 7.1 to my computer. Took just about forever, but there were no problems. When I signed on, I didn't see any changes, but that's often the case.

The first weirdness was when I looked for Internet Explorer and couldn't find it. Nada. I thought I would need to unbury it and put the icon on the desktop. No icon. Didn't think too much about it. Didn't see any new features, either, but what the hell.

I have been using AOL since God was a boy, and 8000+ people and institutions and everybody whose anybody has my email address, so I have beem reluctant to make a MAJOR CHANGE.

Then I needed to update my web site and not finding Internet Explorer was major problemo. Got busy doing something else. Today, for no discernable reason, the fonts in AOL were HUGE. Did not like. Decided to get to the bottom of the IE problem. Discovered I had no IE tool bar. Who knew? Googled around and found information that the registry keys were probably corrupt and restoring them would bring back the toolbar. Fooling around with the registry keys is high stress keep-your-fingers-crosssed stuff, but I persevered. No toolbar. Googled around and thought I found something that mentioned AOL did not use the IE toolbar, but that couldn't be right. Looked all over the friggin computer and found various IE folders but nothing with a key that you could actually click on.

Went into Microsoft and looked for user groups, etc., and found no useful information. Getting mad now. Feeling put upon and also stubborn. Downloaded Google stuff which promised IE toolbar. SOL. Really mad now, having wasted good hours.

I have to either SUCK IT UP bigtime and pay microsoft $59.00 per hour to find out why their IE7 shit the bed without telling me, or pay a geek to come and fix things. I cannot live without IE 7 any longer. This is so annoying. SO VERY ANNOYING. And of course AOL and Microsoft will start finger pointing. EVEN MORE annoying. So I am thinking seriously of leaving AOL which will necessitate DAYS changing email addresess. Right now I am thinking all the words the newspaper cannot print. How did everything get so gd complicated? Thinking of leaving Microsoft for Apple on the next computer. I am mad. Enraged. Bull Shit.

Unwilling to suck it up on this issue.

Grapeshot