interesting issue with online stock price update

[Jack Ostroff]

For the past few weeks/months I've pretty much given up on trying to  
retrieve online stock prices.  This week, I finally updated my sources,  
and most of my stocks retrieved the latest price just fine.  However,  
many mutual funds did not, failing with "Unable to find 'timestamp'  
from date pattern 'chart:result:timestamp' in quote data."  In trying  
to trace down the actual problem, I saw there were two timestamps in  
the created URL, and they decoded to the start of today, and the  
current time.  If there is no price for that fund for today, I can see  
this failure.  I did finally manage to try to retrieve prices for  
yesterday through today, and it worked, but only getting a price for  
yesterday.

So - I wonder if the first retrieval fails, and today is on a weekend  
or holiday, would it be reasonable to try to retrieve the price for  
yesterday or the previous day?  Is there any other way to address this?

Separately, it seems there are lots of different places to get a  
listing of securities, but not all are sortable, and only from some can  
you request an online price update, and from only one of those can you  
actually specify a range of dates.  Am I best off just filing a wish  
list for addressing some of these issues?

For one example, in the Tools/Prices dialog, you can click on either  
the Commodity or Stock Name column head to sort on that column, and  
click again to sort decreasing.  However, from the Equities Tab of the  
Investments View, if you right click and select "Update Stock and  
CUrrency Prices..." clicking on the header has no effect at all, and in  
the Securities Tab, that option is not available.

Also, on the price update dialog, there is no search function, so  
finding a single stock is mildly annoying if you CAN sort the columns,  
but extremely annoying if you can nether sort nor filter.

Thanks for suggestions on where to best address this.

Jack