ardvarkI'm glad I am going in the right direction.
With my default mail client (Thunderbird) I have never experienced this problem, the "send email" window opens and the email is sent without any problem.
You will no doubt find this rather useless information since you are using Outlook Express. I thought so ... so I changed my default email client to Outlook Express.
With my default client as Outlook Express I repeated the test ... the individual email window of Outlook Express was opened, the email was sent ... without any problem and just about instantly received at the account I sent it to.
So, I think that something else is getting in the way.
say you use Outlook Express as your default POP3 mail client and of course, Avast configures it when it is installed so that the mail goes through its servers.
given that you are using Windows XP the above quote is very simply wrong (sorry to be blunt).
avast does not change your email configuration and it does not go through avast servers. avast does intercept (within your system) the outgoing mail and avast does (within your system) scan the outgoing mail.
Your description of what happens when creating the email is puzzling. In my case the Outlook Express send mail window appears with the "from" line set to my default account, the subject line set to the name of the link and the link itself is the text of the message. I am left to fill in the "who to send to" information.
How, in your case, would it know who to send to?
Are you perhaps using some other plugin or software to enable this function?
Which browser do you use?
It has already been suggested but it would probably help if you could post a screenshot of the box as you see it (though please remove any personally identifiable details before you capture the screenshot).