Dave-H

@heinoganda Did the second attempt at forwarding the e-mail work?

Fixed what?

@dencorso I sent you a PM regarding this!

Oh dear! OK I've just forwarded it again from my phone with my signature turned off this time. I don't know if that will make the difference. I also didn't alter the subject line this time either (I added "(Test 3)" to it last time). I hope it gets to you unaltered this time! Cheers, Dave.

Just forwarded the blank e-mail to you @heinoganda. From my phone so Eudora won't corrupt it in any way.

Another strange one this evening. I received another e-mail from Sky, a marketing message, not from the forum, and although it opens immediately in Eudora, the body is completely blank, only the header is displayed! It also does this if opened in IE8 or Firefox! It displays fine in the e-mail app on my Android phone. Another one to analyse! BlankSkyEmail.htm

You need to find KB4462157 and KB4461614 in Add/Remove Programs in Control Panel and uninstall them. They can take some finding as the updates are not listed in order, but they should be somewhere in the list under Microsoft Office 2010. Office should work fine again then. Switch off automatic updating if you have it on or it will automatically install them again. Go to Microsoft Update and do a custom scan for updates. When and if it finds those two updates, hide them. HTH.

They both open fine in Eudora, with no delay.

A couple more example e-mails, this time both from Sky! In this case, one of them opens immediately, the other doesn't. It seems to be only the ones from the Sky support forum which have the problem, other messages from Sky seem to be OK. As before, the non-working one opens in IE8 and displays, but there is then a frozen pause (about the same duration as on Eudora) and then the ActiveX warning banner pops up at the top. The other one displays without this. The working one does reference a .woff file in its source code, but not in the same way or to the same extent as the non-working one. I have tried un-ticking "use separate settings from Internet Explorer" in Eudora's options, and this allows me to use the Accessibility options in Internet Settings to ignore colours, fonts, and styles when displaying pages. This does what it says, and messages in Eudora then display using the default Times New Roman font as expected. It makes no difference to the delay in them displaying though. WorkingSkyEmailSource.htm NonWorkingSkyEmailSource.htm

So if Sky are now using a font for their forum notification messages which isn't supported by IE in Windows XP, presumably it's causing a long delay but eventually it falls back to something else and the message then displays?

So it looks like it didn't even make any attempt to install, which is very strange. If it was an incompatible update I would still expect it to pop up a message telling you that.

This is all starting to sound very complicated and difficult. However, as an exercise it will be fascinating to try! I'm afraid it's all getting a bit over my head though. Is this off-topic for this thread? As the thread was started about making old legacy e-mail clients (like Eudora) work with modern messages, I think it's probably OK. I'm happy to start a new thread specifically for this problem if necessary. Den?

Is there a KB3001652.log file in the Windows folder?

Windows updates are normally logged in the Windows System Event Log. Is there anything recorded there?

Yes indeed, I forgot about that. You said it was a sledgehammer to crack a nut! I actually do have Proxomitron already installed, I cannot for the life of me remember why, but I've had it on the system for years! It's version "Naoko 4.5 (2003-6-1)" which I guess must be pretty out of date now. I can't remember how to use it either, but I'll give it a go if it might help!

Looks like that was a very problematic update when it was rolled out four years ago! One example here. Are you sure it's compatible with XP? At the very end of that thread someone refers to a fix that actually relates to .NET 4.5, which doesn't work on XP of course.

Well that's good news anyway! Thanks again for all your detective work, a shame that there seems to be no answer or workaround for the problem. Cheers, Dave.

Thanks @heinogandaas always. If you're correct, (and you always are! ) then there is no solution to this other than to use another e-mail client. Basically, Eudora can no longer cope with some modern e-mail messages, which is a PITA, but I suppose was inevitable with a program that hasn't been updated since 2006! I'll stick with it for the moment, there are only two regular sources of messages that I receive from which cause the problem, but if it starts affecting more and more messages I will eventually have to review things. The vast majority do still display fine and immediately at the moment. You can actually tell the Sky forum to send plain text instead of HTML, so that is one workaround, although the messages then look awful! I can still just switch to Eudora's own viewer as well, where they still don't look good, but not as bad as sending plain text at source! It still seems strange to me that Eudora can display the messages immediately with its own internal viewer, but can't using the embedded IE viewer option, and the fault seems to be in Eudora itself, and not in IE! Thanks everyone else of course for your input into this, especially @Mathwiz. If anyone else has any brainwaves as to how to work around this I would love to hear them! Cheers, Dave.

Probably not related, but just thought I'd mention that I suddenly started having terrible javascript problems on FF 52.9 ESR just on Facebook, and it turned out that it was Adblock Plus causing it. I disabled it on Facebook, and everything came good. I reported it to Adblock Plus, and got a reply that they had other reports of this and were working on it. As I say, probably irrelevant, but the symptoms were pretty much as the OP described, but for me it appeared only to happen on Facebook.

Wow, amazing detective work there! It may well be that these (and some other) e-mails will never now display quickly in Eudora, but when they do eventually display they look perfect, there's no elements missing or mis-formatting, it's just the delay that's the problem. From what you say it looks as if something is stalling on its loading until it eventually times out and the message then displays, but it is presumably falling back on something else as the message does display correctly.

Thank you so much for looking at this @Mathwiz, I'm sure we will identify what's causing the problem. I hadn't looked at the end of the files so I didn't notice the fonts thing. At least I know now how to fix any messages that I want to keep so they don't take ages to load, but I'd still like to know what's causing the problem in the first place! Did you try loading the files in IE8? If so, did you get the ActiveX warning with the unedited one? Cheers, Dave.

Also KB4461614. KB3115314 was replaced anyway I think. KB4462157 and KB4461614 are the only two I have now kept uninstalled and hidden. All the others seem to be OK.

Yes, I got those three. All installed OK, but whether they are doing what they should without the latest MSO.DLL installed I don't know. I'm still hoping the XP non-compatibility problem will be addressed on Patch Tuesday next week, but I'm not holding my breath!

Well FWIW I think I've now definitely confirmed the logo or something related to it as being the source of the problem. One thing which Eudora can do, which I think is quite unique, is that it allows you to edit received messages and re-save them. I opened one of the problem messages, enabled the editing function, and cut the logo image to the clipboard. I then re-saved it, and without closing it, enabled editing again and pasted the logo back in the same place. After re-saving it, it now looks exactly the same as it did before, but opens instantly, apart for a very slight delay in the logo appearing! Well I say it looks the same, but the weight of the text font seems to have changed slightly between the original and the new version. Comparing the source code on the old and new versions, it does seem quite different, so removing the logo must have removed some other code, which putting it back hasn't replaced. I've attached the two versions to see if anyone can work out what the critical difference is that's causing one to delay opening and the other not. Opening the files in IE8, the edited version opens immediately with no problem, the original opens but then displays the ActiveX security warning bar at the top. It still looks fine though, and still looks the same if I dismiss the warning bar and allow ActiveX to run. The text still looks slightly different between the two versions even in IE8. Very strange! EditedSource.htm OriginalSource.htm

Yes, that does make perfect sense. I guess whatever Eudora is trying to connect to and failing, its actually not helpforum.sky.com! When I looked into this with @heinogandaoriginally last year, I think we thought that the source of the display delay problem was actually just the header logo which is on all of the messages. It was trying to access that which was causing the delay, so I guess I'll have to try and find exactly where that's being server from. The same applied to the e-mails from Marks and Spencer.