I planned for a long time to install IE8 Beta2 in a VM created specially for it, but of course I never got around to doing that (even though all I would have needed to do was make a copy of my existing VM with IE7).

I could also have taken a Snapshot of my VM before installing IE8 Beta 2 but I was out of my mind and didn't.

Instead I relied on a very careful look at the official MS page including the link to the download to make sure there was no "Warning: this installation will over-write your existing IE installation".

There wasn't such a message on that page so I went ahead and expected after the installation to have both IE7 and IE8 Beta 2.

Now I may be wrong but that doesn't seem to be what I have. All my old links to IE7 now load IE8.

Why do I bother telling you this and especially why today ? Because I've just posted my weekly blog item with the additions/changes to the WSS FAQ site and (using IE8) it was a complete mess with not a single line feed in place.

It seems that, in common with Firefox; etc. you can now no longer copy formatted text (empty lines; line feeds etc.) from NotePad into a multi-line entry box but just as with all those other browsers you need to write in your own HTML statements.

This, guys, was why despite using other browsers for many things, I always used IE 6 or 7 for adding or amending to the multi-line edit boxes in my SharePoint sites. And now you've sc**wed it up completely.

Another thing that's scr**ed up completely is logging in to the *Microsoft*(!) forums. Click login and you don't see the standard Passport login box until you by hand amend the URL so that it goes to (something like) www.login.com - i.e. you get rid of all the following stuff.

I suspect (hope) that I will somewhere find a "IE7 compatibilty" button, but for now I re-posted my blog entry in my wife's non-VM IE7 copy (and was grateful to VMWare for putting the text from a file in my VM into a place where the Ctrl-V in the main system could grab it).

P.S. For anyone facing this problem, use the menu item Tools / Compatibility View Settings to add the site that has multi-line fields. Then you are back to a working (!) system. (You can also decide to specify ALL sites as being in Compatibity View mode. I'm not that far, yet)