We always love it when users actually report on their experience with activeRenderer. First time experiences are most valuable to us, beyond what works and and what doesn't (everything usually does), it lets us know what is simple enough, and what is overly complicated. This is the only way we can truly create a better user experience

Publishing and maintaining a user outline, as Pete did, is a great idea. We also welcome all contributions to the ar-support forum.

To answer Pete's issues:

• Even though aR's installation code should kick in properly even when you drop the activeRenderer.root file in Radio's Tools folder while Radio is running, it is actually very difficult to test properly, and thus much safer to quit Radio first, as described in the downloading instructions, then place the downloaded root file in the Tools folder, then restart Radio.
• Thanks to Pete's report, I'll modify aR's startup sequence, so that Radio cleans itself up better after a failed activeRenderer installation attempt: just quit Radio, remove activeRenderer.root from the Tools folder and restart Radio.
• You may download activeRenderer.root with any browser. Whatever your favorite browser might be, the downloading over http might develop problems, resulting in a corrupted activeRenderer.root file once in a while. If your first installation of activeRenderer fails before the registration page is displayed, it's safer to download a fresh copy before trying again.
• We endeavour to make the DHTML in activeRenderer browser agnostic, not a small proposition even these days :-) Our reference platform is the Gecko rendering engine, used by Mozilla and FireFox, which is the most standards compatible browser by far. Then we try to make sure that our code works with Windows MSIE, which is less standards compliant, but is used by 85% of the visitors to this site. Then we check Apple's Safari, which is still the less standards compatible browser of the three, despite Apple's marketing claims. activeRenderer's transclusion feature does not work currently with Safari. We almost never test other browsers, such as Opera, Konqueror or OmniWeb, but welcome all reports.
• I personnaly apologize for all the registration problems. The registration service, graciously hosted in Northern Italy by eVectors, is long due for an overhaul, and often unavailable. Registration is important to us because we can keep track of our current user base. We will come up with a new and simpler registration process in activeRenderer 2.4, due later this summer.
• The main function of activeRenderer is to render outlines saved as OPML format Files into DHTML pages and upload them to your public site. Your outlines must be saved as OPML format files first for the rendering to process smoothly. If you are working from an outline object in Radio's internal database, the safest way of ensuring a proper conversion to OPML, then DHTML is to create a new outline file in Radio (using the File/New menu), then copy the content nodes of the previous outline object into the new file, then save the new file. This will automatically create a new OPML file in your file system. If this file is created under the outlines folder or one of its subfolders, it will be automatically upstreamed as DHTML. Check Radio's Event Log to make sure.

The next 2.3.1 version of activeRenderer is due this week, I'm a touch late on our schedule, thanks to lots of contributions in the alpha and beta testing phases.