news:// in the Outlook Express

Wow, so long time and no posts…

Anyway, this one took me quite some time to figure it out: I use Outlook Express as a newsgroup reader and I was used to starting it by simply typing news:// in the command prompt. I don’t know, I’m just more of a keyboard guy and I liked this shortcut; I don’t really use desktop icons and, if possible, start Word by typing winword.exe.
So, invoking OE from the command prompt worked fine for me, until I installed XP SP2 on my machine. From that moment on, OE just wouldn’t  show me newsgroup posts anymore. All the newsgroups were there, the posts were retrieving from the server successfully, except when I clicked on one to see the whole post, this app just moved the selection focus to the newsgroup name again. Weird. I knew this was somehow connected to the security enhancement features of SP2, but I just couldn’t find any information about this issue anywhere on the net. Maybe because this wasn’t really an issue. After a month or two, I asked myself a question: how many people starts their OE the way I do? And I went and finally started it “the proper way” – by Start menu. Woohoo, works.