Rob Richardson (Yahoo!, FZ10 group, 3 January 2005)...
I noticed some unsettling behavior on some shots. I have a 72-mm UV filter on my camera for lens protection. Sometimes bright sky was illuminating the dust specks on my filter, causing the camera to try to focus on them instead of on the subject. The only way I could find to get around that was to take the filter off.Doug Wilcox (Yahoo!, FZ10 group, 3 January 2005)...
Make sure the filter is as clean as possible, secondly if you are in Macro mode you might consider removing the filter. Although outside the focus range the filter could possibly cause a focus problem in macro mode at full wide angle.