If you're using Microsoft Internet Explorer 4, and you haven't upgraded to Service Pack 2 (SP2), then you may find browsing h2g2 a painful experience, especially if you use a modem.

The problem is that whenever Internet Explorer 4 submits a form (see below), it causes all the graphics files on the following page to be downloaded again, even if they were already in your browser cache. This is a bug in Internet Explorer 4.

So, what is 'submitting a form'? Put simply, any time you fill in a text box in your browser and pass it to h2g2, you're submitting a form. So this includes the following activities:

• Posting to a forum
• Searching h2g2
• Adding a user page
• Editing a user page
• Adding a journal entry

So you can see that it will happen fairly often.

The solution is one of the following:

• Install Internet Explorer Service Pack 2.
• Upgrade to Internet Explorer 5, which does not have this problem.

If you want to fix this problem, simply click on one of the links above, and you will be taken to the relevant page on Microsoft's web site.