It's a plain black page in IE 6 or 8 with Windows 2k or NT with cookies and java disabled. It's fine for me in Firefox with them on.

The black screen may just be a different manifestation of a recurrent and annoying problem we've been having in the Watson hosuehold with all PV pages for the last couple of weeks or so. PV server response is very sluggish. Most pages require three or four attempts to load, getting the "page cannot be displayed" sheet. A lot of pages load incomplete; the one I'm typing on now hasn't downloaded background, for example. Many reply pages don't download formatting so that the quoted text of a whole story escapes from the scroll-down box and is listed in full before the respondent's comments. Some generated reply pages are all centred text. Around 1 in 3 replies I send to the PVB are lost in transit.

This is a real pain.