RE: First quoted sentence. For you, me, and some others this is true, however for many people it is false. However, you can usually tell by the content of the question whether someone is approaching the forum as a first or last resort.

As for the last quoted part, I agree. I can't count the number of times someone has fired back a "Boy you sure are dumb if you haven't done "X,Y,Z" already" without even reading far enough to see that I'ld already tried "X, Y, and Z" as well as "AA through AZ".

It does help to occasionally be pointed to a "How to post questions in this forum" FAQ. Someone posted an excellent article on this a couple of weeks back that really helped me understand the very basic issue of how to ask for help in a way that encourages responses.