>>Take a large shovel and start digging around NT... and please report here if you strike gold. This is just a hunch, and if I'm right, I'd rather be wrong. > >You do have a vivid imagination. I just want to stop my application from cras hing when my kids switch off the other end of the network. Well, what do you expect it to do? It has dirty buffers, uncommited changes, and it can't close the files. Its pants are down, and it's hard to make it unnoticed. We can only hope to find a way to let it die gracefully. What my nightmare imagination created is an image of NT client (or server or whatever) timing the connection out and closing the files without a warning, with no kids playing with the master master switch. (Not joking - I've had a line printer attached to a VAX, which had the master switch, and a hidden master master switch :)