I’ve come to the conclusion that if my brain worked in any kind of logical fashion I would never be able to figure computer stuff out.

Case in point: My recent tussles with Eudora.

First problem: Eudora started telling me, over and over, that it needed to rebuild all the mailboxes. A logical person would assume this meant a problem with Eudora, and I started off taking that logical approach. I let it rebuild a few times, and then I got irked enough to start looking for the real reason.

Which turned out not to be Eudora at all, but the newest update to ZoneAlarm Security Suite. Apparently something inside the latest ZA was the villain in the piece, and the only solution was to dump the upgrade and go back to the previous version. Which I dutifully did, and all was well, except of course that ZA now had to ask me a bajillion times whether to allow this, that, or the other, because all my custom settings went bye-bye with the uninstallation of the upgrade.

OK fine, toodle along… until yesterday when Eudora absolutely, positively, would not send any mail. It’d download it just fine, but would not send out my replies. Arrrrrrrgh! I looked at the Eudora web site for the error number, and they didn’t even list that number, just a similar one, and the official solution to that similar-error-message problem wasn’t helpful.

I got some high level help from Girlfriend, who knows way more about computer stuff than our whole family put together, but even with her best efforts, Eudora wouldn’t budge. I even tried reinstalling it, but no go.

So, off to the message boards again.

About an hour later I found that it (once again) wasn’t really a Eudora problem. It seems that once Eudora gets its innards poked at by other software (and Norton Antivirus seems to be an even bigger problem child than ZA in this regard) it reacts badly to hardware settings. Specifically, a setting in the nVidia chipset in some onboard network cards.

So, I disabled that particular hardware command, rebooted, and all was well.

Sure am glad I’m flexible enough to just keep batting things around, no matter how far into outer space I seem to be venturing. If I took a strictly linear, logical, straightforward approach, I think there’d be a smoking crater where my computer used to be.

EDIT: And when I tried to post this, I got a message from WordPress saying I needed to allow referrers. Which wasn’t a WordPress or Firefox error, but a lack of permissions in ZoneAlarm. You know, maybe I better keep an eye out for a better security suite.

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