Onre more thing that I just happened accross today. It appears that Ultimate WOTD is not properly parsing HTML code, such as the " & " (ampersand, or in HTML: & ). Maybe some translations should be done for a couple simple, common html objects that could possibly be used in the Words of the Days, such as & ® © .

Daniel & Nathan:
I believe the scrollbar (text-area) is the culprit. See a discussion of the problem (which sounds exactly like the one you describe) in the forum.

http://www2.konfabulator.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=8491

Daniel and Nathan:
HANG ON GUYS, I FOUND SOMETHING. Don't know what it is yet, but by watching my widget with the Task Manager, I discovered that the widget is taking up a constant 6 percent of my CPU usage, regardless of whether it has the focus or not. All the other widgets running on my machine are using 0% when they're not active. The 6% goes away after I click on the scrollbar (which isn't visible for Yahoo, because the definition is too short), and then bring the focus off the widget. I wonder if I should email Arlo about this.

Nathan: No, I can't think of any loops that would run after the definition is displayed. I'm stumped. If you care, try running it in debug mode or looking at the source to see if you can figure it out. Also, you could edit the default source to Dictionary.com instead of Yahoo, and see if it does the same thing. (It's on line 149, I think.) The only explanation I can think of is that some other program or widget might be interfering with Ultimate WOTD's function. :-(

Thanks William, I am indeed connected to the internet with a cable modem as well. It actually appears to retrieve and display the first word definition but then goes into an hourglass state.

I haven't looked at the code, but do you have any spin loops in javascript which loop waiting for a resource to be freed or obtained? That's often a culprit.