When creating a Front Page web why can't I preview my work without my
browser trying to connect to my server?  Whe using the editor as a stand alone tool I have no problems but as soon as I use Front Page Explorer I can't preview anything.

Very interesting problem. I never noticed it because I never work offline. But after reading your note I tried it and the had the same problem. I'm guessing you are using MSIE 4.0 as your browser, which automatically opens your dial up connection. What I attempted to do to bypass this problem, was to first of all, unclick the box that said "connect automatically" by cancelling as it was dialing in. The box gives us an option for "work offline" which I clicked on next, however that doesn't work because MSIE is looking in cached files to find what we want to view offline, instead of looking for the FrontPage Page. I'm willing to bet there is a way to configure this to make it work as we want it to, but looking around breifly, I couldn't find it.

What does work offline is previewing in Netscape. If I've guessed right so far, you are using MSIE as your default browser. Therefore if you install Netscape, but keep MSIE as the default browser, you will not interfere with the normal working of MSIE, and will still be able to preview in browswer offline. (You'll have to add Netscape from the little screen that comes up when you click on "preview in browser".

Since you do not already have Netscape installed (or at least not added to the browsers to use for FrontPage previewing), this may seem like a lot to do in order to preview, however let me say that if you are serious about how your site looks and works for visitors, you should always preview it in Netscape and MSIE. (And actually, in older versions of each too, since a lot of your visitiors will have older versions.)You should also view it on different sized screens, since the layout may change as the window size does.

Some things that will work fine in MSIE will not work in Netscape. The scrolling marquee is one example, and music, is often another, depending on what commands you used to insert it.