Kala,
I posed your problem on a sister BBS where there are several very knowledgeable net gurus. I got this reply from a sometimes MARSupial from Britain who calls himself Gecco. He usually is pretty sharp with these things (for a lizard). Here is what he wrote (BTW, I just copied and pasted your post from below.)
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Here is my guess, I have on occasion had probelms with Netscape locking up, the reason for this in my case is as follows.
The stages involved in retrieving a webpage are as follows.
i) Convert page name to an IP address via DNS.
This takes www.Marsdawn.com and looks up it's network address (IP address) which is used from then on.
During this stage the Netscape Status bar reads
Looking up host: www.marsdawn.com
ii) The IP address is contacted
Netscape says
Contacting host: www.marsdawn.com
OR
Contacting host: 123.456.78.9 the IP address in question.
iii) Host responds
Host contacted: awaiting reply
iv) The page is downloaded (the percentage meter shows how long remains)
When I experience hanging it is due to a failure at stage i) the inital name resolution. It appears that if the Netscape program is unable to contact the
nameserver (the machine(s) which do the conversion) the STOP button is inoperative and the user has to wait for the program to timeout which can take
ages. Once the lookup has occurred and you are into the contacting phase the STOP button ought to work.
First things first, is this the stage she hangs at? If so and if she is having this problem a lot then there is most likely a fault on her ISP setup. Either the
nameserver is poorly configured or more likely the line is dropped without her knowing it. When this next occurs tell her to hangup her connection
(assuming she is on a dialup) and redial this normally forces the timeout error or may allow the browser to proceed.
It's worth a try no guarantees though.
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That's it. If I get any more responses over there, I'll let you know.
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