Setup proceeds fine, but when I click the destop icon I get an
hourglass cursor for a few seconds then... nothing. As though I had never clicked. Great. I installed it fine on my machine at work, but I wanted to try it on my laptop at home (it's only really useful
for LCD displays I guess...)

KnowledgeBase told me to try a clean install... I did, to no avail.
I have Win98SE, PIII450, IE5.5..anyone else have similar problems?

Once again M$ uses its monopoly in one area to go after a product that has become a standard. This time, instead of Netscape Navigator, M$ has gone after Adobe Acrobat. The only two technologies that M$ has added to Reader that aren't in Acrobat (as far as I can tell) are ClearType, which only works on LCD monitors (a good description of ClearType can be found at http://grc.com/cleartype.htm) and the addition of a dictionary program to the reader, which is an interesting idea, but probably not worth the increased file size. It will suffer from only being available for Windows machines (Acrobat has been available on most platforms since its inception). I haven't used Reader (and have no intention of doing so) but I imagine that it is probably as bug-ridden as most M$ products when they are introduced. Hey M$, if you want to give something away for free, how about making the dictionary accessible on the right-click menu from every Windows program?

"We are Microsoft. Resistance is futile. You will be assimilated."

Actually, the Adobe version isn't exactly Acrobat either. Adobe uses their reader but you can't see anything until you pay for the book and then, THEN, a code is punched in that lets the type come up on the screen.
MS is giving away some old classics, stuff in the public domain but Adobe never will, can't because you gotta buy something first.
The other thing is that MS provides an add-in for Word so you could epublish yourself. Adobe doesn't provide diddley s***. Why? Because you have to buy something to read the text.
So write some more about money-sucking MSFT and good, ole, kindly Adobe.

Is this some kind of experiment, or does someone just have too much spare time up their sleeves? This program is just a complete abuse of technology (if you even consider it as "technology"). 7MB for a little IE API snatcher -- with added functionality to read text (wow, don't get too excited)!

And what's with that icon? It looks like a scribble of a tree with 3 bloobs making up the leaves -- probably drawn by the developer's 2-year-old daughter!

...one thing I wish they would do though is add support for more emails in passport. I've never been able to keep a hotmail account spam free for more than day (I've had spam in the inbox before I"ve even sent an email or given out the address :) Luckily I have an MSN account (not so bad) but for everyone else that's not an option.

Just to let you all know who don't like it, this product probably shouldn't be released anyways for the desktop. The technology only really shines on handlelds (pocket pc's). Also, I don't think cleartype really works at all unless you have an LCD monitor.. so that might be a problem too :)

Back In My Day, we had this little thing we called Adobe Acrobat Reader...I miss those days...*SNIFF*...It was a lot better than this crazy thing...

I was not all that impressed with this technology. Beats reading browser text, I guess. nowhere near as good as hard copy though...not even close in my opinion.

What I don't understand is how this program is 7MB. I will admit I haven't installed it yet but a 7MB download for a program that displays text on the screen? The cleartype technology can be implemented in a few hundred lines of code and the other features I imagine it has like indexing, etc... can't possibly bloat the software that much! I don't get it!

I agree with you. Bloat is the standard Microsoft way. (Microsoft's)A Big, bullying company with so much code and money they don't know how to distribute something light for the user. Much less give a damn about the end user. And, this reader definitely doesn't replace paper. I know my books don't disappear or go up in flames when my Win98se system needs goes south (once every 6 months if I'm lucky). Damn, if I had to purchase all my books every 6 months what would I do? Hey. Maybe this is a new strategy for MS? Maybe they have major stock in these e-book companys? Sounds like a new Justice Dept. investigation in the making!!!

MS Reader requires an MS Passport account to activate each copy. You are only allowed to activate 2 copies of MS Reader for each passport account. The activation is tied to the hardware characteristics of each computer, so it seems that if you ever have to upgrade your equipment and re-install Windows and the reader, or if you buy a new pocket/palm PC, your copy-protected purchases will be unreadable.

If you never intend to purchase copy-protected books, activation is not necessary. See http://etext.virginia.edu/ebooks/ebooklist.html for a list of 1200+ e-books in the public domain.

I'm not sure that this is the case. It depends on what it uses to register the hardware. If it's a serial number for the processor or some such item you might be ok since that won't change with the new installation. You would just need to re-activate.

Either way you would still have access to that book on the secondary computer. I also don't think that they intend these things to last forever. They are more of a read and delete book. If you want a permanent copy you can pass on to friends the hard copy is still the best.

PS Thanks for the great site!