I was having hassles with paltalk getting thru.

Kendall,

I do understand Paltalk's response perfectly, but then perhaps I can talk "gobbledegook".... :-)

I thought that they explained things rather well, but if you would like to let me know just where you lose the thread of their explanation, perhaps I can use my Wordsmith skills and explain it in terms that may be more comphrensable to you.

The technically significant part of their 'gobbledegook' response was

"Our servers have been under constant denial of service attacks. For those of you that do not know what a denial of service attack is, consider what would happen if 5000 people were constantly calling your cell phone and 4999 were deliberate wrong numbers. Your cell phone would be rendered useless."

Perhaps if you look at just this bit and think about it, it may help you. You won't be able to get a response from the Paltalk server if it is 'busy' or being swamped with many false requests - i.e. a 'denial of service attack'.

I just tried, and got in without hassle.

You may have a software problem on your machine - something may be conflicting, but that sort of thing is almost (but not necessarily completely so, if enough clues can be obtained!) impossible to diagnose at a distance from the machine...

Basically, you did the right thing - if you are not getting connected, set your machine back to a working state.

I can't help you with WinXp - I run Win 98 - so someone else may be able to assist you more closely with that side of it.

When I run Paltalk, the folowing steps happen

1) I click on the 'start paltalk' link to the s/w

2) it starts an icon in the tray - I click on that and click 'start paltalk' (I don't have paltalk running on bootup, which is why I need step 1 above)

3) a Window opens up titled 'Paltalk logon'- this has a button labelled 'having trouble logging on - click here'

4) the next result is having completed the logon details and clicked to proceed, a new window replaces the logon window with a list of 'online pals' which should be empty for a new user.

It sounds like you may be stuck between steps 3 & 4 --- if that is the case, the 'denial of service attack' is keeping you from connecting. If you are not reaching step 3, the s/w is having problems - as I said I can't go much further without more direct info.


Robin