I’d reinstall Internet Explorer 3 or upgrade to IE4 if I was you - I’m sure that IE5 is a fine product but I’m quite happy to let others uncover its problems. You don’t provide the specification of your machine but I guess that it’s at least 18 months old if it is running IE3. I also wouldn’t recommend an upgrade to IE5 without knowing that the hardware has sufficient memory and hard disk space to handle the software.

Re-installing IE3 shouldn’t affect your Favourites or the Address Book, but it’s always useful to make a back-up copy of any files you are worried about losing before reinstalling. I’m not sure whether reinstallation will clear up the mail problem. As an experiment, it would be a good idea to just move the relevant files and see what happens, restoring them if necessary.

I often help pupils print pages from the web. Sometimes, however, we can’t print text as it is white format on a black background. Can I change the setting before I print to reverse it black on white? - L Oates, London

You don’t say which browser software or version you are using. Changing the background colour is straightforward in Netscape Navigator. From the Edit menu choose Preferences and then select colours. You will then see a box, which lets you change background, and foreground colours. In Netscape Communicator, you can also check the box that makes your colours automatically override those of a page that is loaded.

In Internet Explorer 4 there is also a setting that can be accessed by choosing Preferences from the Edit menu. From Web Browser, click Browser Display. In the Page amp; Link area, click the Color Picker that corresponds to the item you want to change.

When printing Internet material, the extreme right edge of the text sometimes doesn’t print although it appears fine on the screen. Even if I copy the text to Word and fiddle around with font sizes and margins it still won’t print. Is there a solution? - C Evans, Peterborough

This question seems simple but it has a long answer. The way material is structured in HTML (the mark-up coding behind web pages) affects how it is displayed and printed. Pages designed to be viewed at 800 x 600 resolution are likely to present problems when printed to A4. Generally, pages are designed for screen and interaction; print is a secondary issue.

Assuming you only wish to print the content rather than page design, there is a solution. Copy and paste the text into an empty Word document (or save the web page as a plain-text file and open it in Word), and then use Find and Replace to remove line breaks while preserving paragraph spacing. Rich Woods, of Cheltenham and Gloucester College, has supplied a Word ‘97 macro to do this. It won’t solve all situations but will sort out most simple (non-tabulated) text. You can find it on the Online website at www.tes.co.uk Questions are answered by Les Watson

If you have any computer problems you can’t solve, write to Qamp;A, TESOnline, Admiral House, 66-68 East Smithfield, London E1 9XY or email:TES_Online@newsint.co.uk