Every so often, I experience some strange happenings in Outlook Express
6.00.2900.2180

I normally work in Rich Text(HTML) mode, and I use some background
stationery, and an MS font "Comic Sans MS".

I always send and reply in HTML.

Once in a very great while, I'll get a message from someone which shows up
in "Plain Text" mode, and the message is loaded with lots of what looks like
HTML codes, and is a real mess. But this is very rare.

About 6 months ago, one of my friends advised me that he was getting all the
mail I sent him, in that "messed up" mode. But all his other e-mails were
coming in fine. I checked over my system, and sent several test message to
myself and others, but they all were fine. Suddenly after a few weeks of
this, everything returned to normal at his end - my end was normal for
receiving and sending, all through this. And things have stayed normal since
then.

I didn't make any changes to my system or settings during all this period,
as I couldn't find anything wrong anywhere.

Today, a different one of my very computer savvy friends reported the same
situation. My HTML messages to him were coming through in plain text, and
had the tons of HTML garbage coding visible in the text. He also always
works in HTML mode.

He clicked on "reply", and the window that came up was in plain text. When
he tried to switch to HTML mode, it refused to do so.

So I went to another one of my machines, generated a similar HTML message,
with a jpg image in it, and sent it to him, and a copy to myself. This time,
his copy and my copy both arrived fine - HTML all the way.

I'm at a loss to understand what is happening, and what the fix might be.
Right now, his machine is the only machine I've sent to which shows this
problem. But when I sent to him from a different machine - all was well. So
obviously, there must be some setting on my main machine that's related to
the problem - but it isn't a problem for anyone else I send to.

Does anyone have any ideas -

Ron Hirsch