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There is an easy way to prevent the "Connection Status" window from popping up.

My "Connection Status" window, with buttons for "Disconnect" or "OK", keeps popping up while I'm doing email in Outlook Express. How do I stop it from doing that? I do want to it to pop up, however, when I'm disconnecting from the Home Page. Oh, and I'm on AT&T.

I got that from a friend recently, and I wasn't able to come up with an answer at the time.

Of course that means I'd missed something very simple.

My friend contacted me today and followed up:

To make the long story short, for some reason the "hang up after send and receive" had been checked; so I simply unchecked it and that was that!

Simple, indeed. Here's what was happening...

With "hang up after send and receive" checked, Outlook Express dutifully drops the dial-up connection when it's done sending or receiving email, popping up that status window. If you do disconnect then that means that the next time it wants send or receive, it needs to connect. In order to connect, the status window pops up again.

And this can be often, as another setting defaults to "Send Messages Immediately", meaning that as soon as you hit "send" on a message, Outlook will attempt to connect and send it.

So you'd get the pop-up each time you send a message, each time you try to check for new mail, or each time you switch from Outlook to your browser to surf the web.

By the way, my friend reports that AT&T's chat with an agent support was particularly helpful.

Apparently more helpful than I was.

Article C2287 - February 21, 2005

Leo Leo A. Notenboom has been playing with computers since he was required to take a programming class in 1976. An 18 year career as a programmer at Microsoft soon followed. After "retiring" in 2001, Leo started Ask Leo! in 2003 as a place for answers to common computer and technical questions. More about Leo.

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