computer question

How many colors and what resolution do you have ir set to? 640X480 and 16 colors looks pretty bad.

You might has this effect if your connection speed is slow. Some pictures have such format so when they partially loaded they have have extremely low resolution(mosaic effect) Try to wait and see if this goes away.
SteveB wrote:

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Of course we know everything here on r.c.m, but even so you might need to find a photo or computer newsgroup to get a good answer. Someone on rec.photo.digital might know the answer or know which newsgroup would be good ~ there are about nine dozen Outlook Express support newsgroups.
Anyhow, my first guess is that your ISP is caching photos upstream of you, and severely compressing them to save space and use less bandwidth.
If you've had any changes made to your system since the problem started, in theory you could back the changes out to fix the problem; with difficulty if the changes were made by automatic Microsoft updates.
It may be your browser is having trouble with progressive jpegs, and only downloading the first (coarsest) iteration. I've seen several webpages saying stuff like "It's important to note that some software is incapable of displaying progressive JPEGs, most notably, the free Imaging program bundled with many versions of Windows." However, if your Outlook Express used to work that's probably not it.
Note, has some pertinent suggestions, including cache clearing and reloading single images. -jiw

Ahh, dialup acceleration, aka Slipstream. Speak to your ISP /mark
SteveB wrote:

If you can display a Jpeg image on your local harddrive in your webbrowser then there is nothing wrong with your system.
if you have never used your browser in this way simply enter c:\foldername\filename to display the file.
If your ISP is providing a web accelerator service you need to check the quality settings for it, otherwise select the image , right click and select display image, and see if it displays OK.

One possibility is that you are not waiting long enough for a slow connection or slow server.
There is an option these days when displaying a JPEG picture in html, and the picture builds up in very coarse pseudo-pixels first, then continually refines the image to smaller and smaller pixels.
Wait a long time and see if this happens. If it never gets better, then something is wrong.

It never gets better. I have rightclicked my desktop and tweaked those properties. Gone to control panel and hardware controller. Called Cox Communications. I think I am just going to drop a video card in there and see what happens. Probably just switch one from another computer.
STeve

Sounds like you are running at 16 colors. Maybe a driver issue.
SteveB wrote: