I have no idea why and desite paying money to join the spectacularly useless Mandrake Club thing for extra support nobody has come up with an answer yet.

Erm... maybe because Mandrake Club is not a subscription-based support service? Read the website!

To clarify: For free-beer advice, there are several mandrake support sites, Mandrakeuser.org being one of the most useful, and several mandrake-specific news groups. And there is paid support if you want.

Mandrake Club, however, is none of these, as is made clear on the web site. It is a means for satisfied users to give some money to support Mandrake and, instead of simply asking for donations, Mandrake offer a limited amount of extra facilities to Club members such as preferential downloads or member-only servers to avoid d/l bottlenecks. That's all.

HTH Syd