Companies have spent millions of dollars jazzing up their Web sites so investors, customers and employees can have instant access to all kinds of information over the Internet and avoid the delays of snail mail and the hassle of corporate switchboards. Marketing materials, product information, financial documents, management biographies and other information once found in outdated annual reports or Securities and Exchange Commission filings are now freely available online. But that doesn't mean pulling information off a Web site is necessarily easy, or even user-friendly. Though high-speed Internet connections are gaining popularity, for now most visitors to a corporate Web site still get there via dial-up connection, which isn't fast enough to make the most of a live Webcast of a fourth-quarter conference call. While laptops and other portable devices with wireless Internet connections also are gaining steam, they're still not fast enough to conveniently download an annual report, for instance, in the form of a portable document format, or PDF. And it can be incredibly irritating when fat reports loaded with colorful charts and graphics clog up an office printer. Indeed, sometimes there's nothing like a good old-fashioned hard copy, with space to make notes in the margins and actual text to highlight. That's why it's just as important that visitors be able to easily order documents off a Web site and have them delivered via regular mail. A sampling of the Web sites of five of the nation's most widely held stocks revealed a wide range of ease of use. All are equipped to take online orders for investor kits, but some are far easier to navigate than others. Content of the kits also varied, from very informative to quite sparse. Microsoft Inc. and Merrill Lynch & Co. received the highest marks overall, including most navigable sites, fastest delivery time and most informative investor packages. Compaq Computer Corp. came in as the most cumbersome site to get around, and both Compaq and Ford Motor Co. had disappointing investor kits. The least impressive kit came from was AOL Time Warner Inc. The media giant boasts an impressive Web site, chock full of information and it was easy to get around. But the investor kit offers precious little information about the newly combined company, which completed its merger last month. Then there are the sites that didn't deliver -- literally. Airliner UAL Corp. and financial-services firm Morgan Stanley Dean Witter & Co. didn't get reviewed because their kits never showed up. UAL promises delivery in three to five days, and I received an electronic note confirming that my request had been received and my order would be mailed promptly. But because of a computer glitch at CCBN.com, the Boston-based online investor services outsourcing firm used by UAL, none of the orders placed in early February were filled. A spokesman for CCBN said the problem has been fixed. Even though I received an electronic message from Morgan Stanley saying that my package would be mailed out to me, the firm couldn't locate a record of my order. Not that it would have mattered. Morgan Stanley, which handles between 250 and 300 such orders a month in-house, says it put a hold on fulfilling investor kit requests until its new annual report is ready this spring.