Is there a screen link or button that would allow one to see only the items that have been posted since last visit? I may be missing it, requiring me to go through each forum with a red coffee cup which slows reading the posts down, considerably...

Unfortunately, there is no one click options for this. When you log on to the Café, every forum that has new posts since your last visit will have a red cup. It only takes a few seconds to scroll down the list of forums to find those. When you click on a forum, the topics that have new posts will have a red cup. No one is interested in every forum on the Café so you just have to pick those your interested in.

Since you are very new to the Café, almost every topic is going to have a red cup. If you want to start from scratch, there is an option at the topic of page that says "mark all topics as read". That will make all the cups turn to white.

When you read a topic, the cup will be white the next time you visit.

Yes, I understand that...that's what I've been doing, but sometimes the forum seems to come to a screeching halt when whatever I've clicked on just sits and goes nowhere...I'm using firefox and I've tried the same on IE...same result...and chrome, for whatever reason, won't load on my computer without constantly crashing...

The response time on the Café is sometimes slow. The number of members on line or doing searches often has an impact. It shouldn't crash your system but it could take a while for a response. The Café is cookie based so you may want to delete your cookies once in a while. That may speed up your responses.

Will do...thanks...