Thanks to David and dadiOH for responding. Dave my apologies - I
failed to mention that I was using Win XP SP3 and the selected text in
most text related applications turned dark blue and became unreadable.
I noticed this first in the browser of Agent the newsreader when I
selected a message to retrieve - it occurs in other applications as
well.

I beleive that dadiOH's suggestion has solved the problem.

Thanks to both ouf you.

FDM