Anyone can make a mistake with a computer. It frequently takes a trained professional to foul things up beyond all recognition. Take one trained professional. Add some beta software. Throw in a new product release. It’s a recipe for disaster.

I’m discussing, of course, last week’s long-anticipated, dreaded release of Internet Explorer 5 and Outlook Express 5, the latest, greatest Internet software from our “friends” at Microsoft. I have actually installed about 20 new web browsers since 1994, some of them many times. This isn’t bragging, but rather an admission of guilt. Besides, I had plenty of time to reflect as I was reformatting my hard drive on Friday.

Being a trained Internet professional, I had nothing to worry about, right? Except, of course, for downloading the files for IE5. That took most of the day Thursday, and was only the start of the problem. You see, as a trained Internet professional, I had naturally been using the beta version of IE5 and Outlook Express since mid-December. The performance had been a little ragged – IE5 clearly needed work. So I decided to back up all my mail and important data files and *delete* the beta software before installing the new IE5.

A half-hour later, I was all set, with one teensy-weensy problem. All of my email since December 20, 1998, had vanished. Yes, the files still existed. But the NEW, improved, FINISHED version of Outlook Express 5 couldn’t import any of the mail that was received or written or filed using the beta version.

This posed No Problem for a trained Internet professional, of course, and I soon found my answer – that there was, in fact, no way I would ever see those 1,500 messages again, unless I could restore the beta software, which Microsoft has removed from all its servers.

To make a long story short, and to leave out the exciting, technical details, the kind of details that are best shared between only trained Internet professionals because they appreciate them so much more than normal people with real lives, someone here at work still had the beta files. One reformatted hard drive, fresh install of Windows 98 and reinstall of the by-now infamous beta 5 software later, I was nearly back to where I was in the beginning. By now it was Friday, 6 p.m. The trained Internet professional went grumpily home.

“But you LIKE to mess up your computer. That’s why you load beta software,” Significant Other pointed out helpfully over dinner. Hmmph. She picks the strangest times to get logical.

Anyway, now it’s Monday. I’m happy to report, for any of you who are contemplating an upgrade from Internet Explorer beta 5 to Internet Explorer 5 Gold, that things will probably go OK if you simply install the new software over the old. Don’t delete anything, even if it makes sense to you. Trust me. I’m a trained Internet professional. The only other thing that we know, for sure, that can go wrong is that the new version will then download all your mail properly, with one teensy-weensy problem: it will download the same messages, over and over again. Hundreds of them at a time. Don’t worry. This happened to another trained Internet professional, over the weekend.

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In the beginning, which was about 1990, no one could mess up a computer with a browser. The main reason, of course, was that only four or five people actually had browsers, and they were all the sort of people who could, if necessary, build computers out of spare toaster ovens and television sets and such. By 1994, however thousands of people were routinely "firing up their browsers" and "surfing the web," as we used to say before the phrases were banned from common usage by the United Nation's Treaty on Globally Annoying Internet Cliches. Then came the "browser wars," in which Netscape and Microsoft competed to see which of them could produce Internet software with the largest downloadable file size, a battle Microsoft inevitably won by requiring continuous, infinite browser updates. Millions of users are now using hundreds of browser permutations and now, in 1999, there is almost no computer on the planet that has not been messed up by a browser, or two, or five.

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Netscape 5 is due out in July, which means the beta will be out soon. I can’t wait …