FL310 I agree. But the browser opening up over messenger and then having to close it again was not what I wanted. Preferences could not fix the problem.
I tried a complete reinstall with no success.
So next I saved my user profiles to another directory, deleted netscape altogether, reinstalled netscaped and then moved only the Mail content into the netcapse folder.
This then rectified the problem.
Seems the
lipref.js and
prefs.js folders were the culprits that caused my initial problem.
So the good news is the wife is OK, the kids "live" and I am no longer going insane. Well almost.