Oh my gosh! It was something so simple! I took another hard look at my link. There was a space between one of the quote marks and one of the carets ("_blank"-SPACE-caret). I eliminated the space, and voila! the link works fine. HTML is sooooo picky! I still don't know why Arachnophilia or for that matter my HTML validator program didn't catch this. Or maybe those programs just eliminate spaces by default and don't even inform the user of these small edits.

Sue