Microsoft has released a hotfix for a problem that crept into the Windows XP Service Pack 2.

Under certain circumstances, IE gives you a misleading “Page cannot be displayed” message. It really should be giving you a “Warning: Page has Expired” message.

If you are:

• using Internet Explorer under Windows XP SP2,
• go to a webpage where you enter some data,
• leave the webpage,
• use the back-arrow to try to go back to it, AND
• if the webpage has a “cache-control: no cache” header

then Internet Explorer will give the wrong message. Microsoft has released a hotfix for this problem.

For a nicer, more elegant solution, Get Firefox! Use I.E. only when you have to, such as for Windows Updates. You should see a lot less spyware — Firefox doesn”t “do” Active-X, so the spyware can”t install itself as easily.

Switching browsers is not an all-or-nothing step. Both I.E. and Firefox, as well as Mozilla, Opera, and others, can all co-exist peacefully on your computer. You can even run them simultaneously — I often do when I”m working on web pages. So, try Firefox. I think you”ll like it.