@ AC 10:02
Then you were doing it wrong. See here:
http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html
Bear in mind:
* On the Internet, nobody can see your dress or personal grooming. All they can judge you by is your spelling and grammar, content and tone. And believe me, they will judge you -- a misplaced apostrophe can be a far greater faux pas than wearing the wrong sort of shoes.
* What sort of a response would you expect to get if you called a vet and said "my animal isn't very well", without mentioning what kind of animal it is or what symptoms it is showing? What sort of a response whould you expect from a garage, if you said "my car isn't right" without mentioning a make, model and details of the fault? Well, don't expect it to be any different with your computer.
* Many people in the Open Source Community are doing it out of the goodness of their own hearts, or at least out of a deep-seated conviction that they are doing someone else a favour. The fact of not getting paid for it might also inform their responses to some extent.
* If you aren't showing some measure of willing to help yourself -- at least a search on the Internet -- then expect short shrift. Demanding that other people go out of their way to help you while you sit on your backside doing nothing but whinge makes you look like a leech.
* When you have fixed your problem, post about it afterwards on your own blog. That means there's one more site for the next person to find who goes searching for help with the same problem you had. And if you asked for help on a mailing list or newsgroup, post there (1) to let people know your problem is solved and (2) to say thank you to whoever helped.