hehe.. Horizons been down has meant that I could catch up with other things that have been mounting up. Built a new pc and installed Os/drivers/games for my folks, then did the same with my laptop (well formatted and installed Xp so far) as that's been playing up for about 6 months now. No applications could access the internet; i.e. Outlook, any game including Horizons (but bizarly Serious Sam works online), Media Player. IE worked of course; it was like a firewall was active but none was installed and the Windows firewall was 'disabled' apparently.
I know a fair amount about pc's, but this was beyond me so rather than mess around I backed up the hard drive on to my main pc and formatted. One word: Adv3nt. It's been cursed since manufacturer since birth but at least very rarely crashes.
Tonight if it's still down, which realistically will probably be the case, I'll finish off the laptop with software/games, read a good book for a while and a bit of Thief III.
Best regards to all from the red/white stripey one!
Spirit, Unity