Generally help topics here are answered by non-staffers in the GFN, and (while sort of a weak excuse) I don't really have time or resources to answer everyone's questions. Of late it seems that the topics in the help forum have been neglected, but honestly the entire community has been a bit dead (ha ha nurr) these past couple of months. So when newcomers post help requests often there are very few people around who can or desire to take the time to answer the questions.
This is especially the case now, because as you might have noticed, there's a bit of a trend in the recent topics, in that they are mostly related to XP problems. While it's regrettable that a lot of topics recently have not been answered, I can see that people have attempted to answer this question many times in the past, and there are a number of possible fixes. There's also a rather lengthy post regarding XP issues that's been stuck in the "Read Before Posting" topic. In a perfect world, newcomers would read that post along with the many other XP-related threads before posting their own.
A major reason I haven't been very helpful of late, personally, is the fact that I do not run Windows XP on my computer, and really don't see myself going to that operating system anytime soon, so I can't really give people answers about that stuff from first-hand experience. As I understand it though, there's really no perfect solution for running Grim Fandango on that OS. The official patch is old and wasn't coded for XP (or Win2K for that matter), so users will not really find much help from it. However, I have heard rumors about an unofficial program along the lines of ScummVM (
http://www.scummvm.org) in the works for the GRIME engine.
Anyway, I think you have to "pick up" the bone grinder (the + key) rather than using the default action. And maybe be a little more descriptive in your topics. "The Grim Fandango Network is Terrible" isn't really new information for anyone. Although this might sound like a cop-out on the staff's part, perhaps you could lend a hand around the help forum rather than berating us.