I got a chuckle out of our local KFC that had a sign for a while reading, "$400 Value Meals Now Here." I've learned to read past/through typos on posts on GW or elsewhere, although I do have a handful of pet peeves. It's like talking with friends - their grammar isn't as important as their friendship and what they have to share. What really gets me, though, are typos in articles on news websites. You'd think that people in the information business would be scrupulous about spell-checking and editing. Typos in books bug me too - sometimes I think I should have been a copy editor instead of a Special Ed teacher (and now home schooling mother - my kids are NOT going to like having me correct their papers someday!). About ESL (English as a Strange Language!), our son has Asperger's Syndrome, a mild form of autism. One of the characteristics of AS is being very literal-minded and having difficulty understanding euphemisms/figures of speech. We are ALWAYS having to "define" figures of speech for him, because they just make NO SENSE to him at all. The expressions "Cat got your tongue?" and "I have a frog in my throat" really grossed him out until we explained them. Sometimes I feel like I have to be a walking dictionary of American colloquial speech. (And there are several good dictionaries for figures of speech available, some written specifically for people who have AS. Who knew? I've GOT to get one!) Laurel (who is a transplant from OH to NY, and still occasionally can't figure out whether to say "soda" or "pop" when referring to a soft drink)

I must take issue with snidely's item #2 re automatic Windows updates. A few years back there was a real problem with some HP computers that had AMD processors. This may have been the update for SP3, but my memory can't say for sure. The machines went into an endless reboot loop. My desktop was one of the affected ones, as was my friend's. There was finally a "fix" issued by HP which we were able to employ. My HP laptop, also with an AMD processor, although a different one, was not affected at all. I have also had minor problems with some of the .Net updates, so I always install those separately from other updates. Just my experiences, so one does learn from those not to just blithely set automatic updates. Obviously snidely is not a mother, or he would know that 13 year olds can be very sensitive and sometimes overly dramatic. This has nothing to do with good parenting, so he would best keep remarks about such to himself. I am a great grandmother as well as a former school teacher (12, 13, 14 year olds), so I have seen it all.

If you get thoroughly fed up, try this. Various editions of Word have a problem with carriage returns, so to speak, and both Outlook and webmail. Open your document, hit ctrl-H, and replace paragraph marks (^p) with line returns (^l). Now send it to yourself and see if it fixes the formatting. This is not an OS problem, it's Word's. I do agree, however, that a resume is a document in itself and should be sent as a formatted attachment.

Ginny, AutoHotKey is a small, easy to learn, free programme that will do exactly what you require and much much more! You can simply edit one of the example files using Notepad and change it to suit your needs. If you make a mistake nothing gets harmed - just keep trying until it does what you want. It is even easier to use if you read the help file first because it explains everything in simple terms! I have made a file for you that starts Firefox and Word at the same time when you press WinKey and q together. Just open Notepad and copy and paste the following few lines into it and save the file as "win q.ahk" (without the quotes). It works when you press the WinKey and q together. (You can edit the file and choose any key you prefer later.) *** copy and paste the next lines *** ; win+q Start Firefox and Word when you press WinKey and q together #q:: Run c:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\Firefox.exe Run c:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office\Winword.exe *** don't copy this line *** Make sure you don't miss the semicolon on the first line. Colin Here is a link that might be useful: AutoHotKey