Q I thought the idea of turning my Navigator bookmarks into my start page (One desktop, two browsers: 72 tips, January 99, p74) was a great idea, but I ran into a problem. I did exactly as the article said ù went to Edit-Preferences-Navigator and made sure the Home Page button was selected and entered the path (by browsing for it) to my bookmarks.htm file. But when I start my browser (Communicator 4.5) all I get is the address in the location bar of my bookmarks.htm file and a "broken" place holder icon in the top left of the screen. Please help.

A I was unable to fault the instructions for turning bookmarks into a start page, as they worked perfectly for me on several different attempts. There appears to be no "instant fix" for your problem, or at least none that I could find through my usual troubleshooting resources. However, since your copy of Communicator appears to being working correctly, the finger seems to be pointing at your bookmark file, which may have become corrupted. Here are a few things you could try.

If Communicator is running, close it down and open up your Netscape user directory (usually in C:\Program Files\Netscape\Users). Change the name of the bookmark.htm file to bookmark.old, and restart Communicator. This will create a new bookmark file. Add some bookmarks and check that they work properly, and then try creating a start page using the instructions from the 72 Browser Tips article. If you can create the start page and load it successfully, you may be able to import your old bookmarks into the new bookmarks file. To do this, go to the Bookmarks menu, select Edit Bookmarks, then choose File-Import and select the bookmark.old file.

ItÆs worth noting that Communicator 4 has difficulty displaying local HTML files if the helper application and MIME type for "Hypertext Markup Language" files is set incorrectly in NavigatorÆs preferences, or if the MIME type for "Netscape Hypertext Documents" in Windows is inappropriate. To check NavigatorÆs settings, select Edit-Preferences-Navigator-Applications and choose Hypertext Markup Language from the Applications box. In the File Type Details section, the MIME type should be text/html. If it isnÆt, click the Edit button, type text/html in the MIME type box, select Navigator in the Handled By section, and click the OK button.

To check the MIME settings used by Windows, open up Windows Explorer, choose View-Options-File Types tab, and select "Netscape Hypertext Document" from the Registered File Types list. The MIME type should be text/html. If it isnÆt, click the Edit button, select text/html from the list in the Content Type (MIME) box and click the OK button.