Problem solved. I just downloaded over a hundred Microsoft updates that I've neglected to install. Although I do still sometimes have to refresh maryrenaultfics once or twice to get the posts to appear, they do eventually; and every other problem seems miraculously to have disappeared.

There's a moral in there somewhere, I suppose.

One thing's for sure, though: no credit accrues to LiveJournal Support, who basically just left me dangling. Let us instead thank ESET: when I was about to do a virus check, it decided as a preliminary to tell me that my operating system was not up to date, and suggested I click for updates.

Light dawned....

Ah, the sun is out (though it's actually nearly nine p.m.); birds are singing; and I see little apples on the tree. They will be picked in the near future, I promise.

So today LiveJournal's been playing me up. This is not the first time, of course. Nor, I suspect, will it be the last. I do hope they get whatever-it-is debugged soon, though.

All day, when I've tried to access a page on LiveJournal, such as my blog or my friends page, I've been getting a pop-up from Internet Explorer saying that it cannot open it. This doesn't happen every time; but it does occur about eighty percent of the time. (You understand, of course, that I am actually seeing the page perfectly well behind the pop-up!) Anyway, when I click off the pop-up, it all goes blank. However, when I hit the BACK button, I go "back" to the page I've been trying to reach. So this is an infernal nuisance, but not terminally so.

More of a problem, though, is the fact that there are some communities that I truly am not accessing. Oh, not all. Some simply have the "pop-up problem" with access. That's true of fkcommentfic (which is currently of interest), and also of Yuletide Admin and FK Fic Fest (for I've been clicking around a bit to check). But maryrenaultfics is being tiresome. I can get the page all right; but all I see is the header. No posts. And yes, I am logged in; so the fact that the comm is closed shouldn't make a difference. I'm not seeing any posts, not even the old ones.

Of course, I contacted the LJ troubleshooters, who promptly suggested that I upgrade to Internet Explorer 8. Which I have done. (And I don't like it. But that's for later.) The point here, though, is that the upgrade hasn't done any good. So I can only keep my fingers crossed that they think of something that does work.

I suspect that they've been doing some silly little upgrade tweak, and it's fouling up on Internet Explorer. Again. (It always seems to be Internet Explorer that gets a bad reaction when they upgrade.) And yes, I know, someone is going to suggest I switch to Firefox or Chrome, right? Only I don't want to. I've got used to Internet Explorer.

Which brings me to this IE8. Now, I've fixed some things. I googled up a way to get rid of the extra nonsense listed on a toolbar I don't need, and then I got rid of that as well: that returned the browser's general appearance to something resembling normal. However, they've added a so-called "security feature"—to wit, greying very pale almost all of the URL of the webpage you're looking at—and you CAN'T TURN IT OFF!!!! It's like looking at your wristwatch: you don't realize how often you do it until you take it in to be cleaned; and then you keep glancing down at a bare wrist, and getting a shock. I keep glancing up at the address bar, only most of the address is nearly invisible. I want to know what page I'm on, darn it; and I don't want to have to keep shifting the cursor up (which turns it dark and legible).

Also, when I do VIEW and SOURCE, I don't get Notepad any more. I get some fancy page with the code in colours. It used to be that I could hit SOURCE and do my editing straight off. Now I have to work around everything in a silly, complicated way.

Edited at 2:04 a.m. I did a bit more googling, and found out how to fix this at least. SOURCE now gives me Notepad again. That's one small mercy!

And, to top it off, I've just discovered that some of the pages on my website don't read properly in IE8. This means, of course, that anyone using it hasn't been able to read some of my stories—or at least not easily. Whether the problem exists with other recent browsers, I don't know. Fortunately, it only seems to apply to pages I've done in the last month. It also looks as though all I have to do is change p to div, and add a few line-breaks. So it's a nuisance, but a petty one. (I know what this is, though. It's the upgrade from HTML4 to HTML5. They're phasing out some of the old mark-up.)

Basically, this is all a right royal pain in the neck. I hate change. And, right at the moment, I'm more than a little browned off with LiveJournal. I really do hope they get this all fixed. And soon!