>I don't personally know Steve Gibson, (at least not *this* Steve Gibson), but I can vouch for him as being a technical wizard and all around good guy. I used to (and still do!) use a product he made called Spin-rite, for detecting/repairing bad sectors on hard drives. Great product. (even if you *think* bad sectors aren't a problem with IDE drives, guess again, it still is). Another product I used of his, is TIP (TroubleInParadise) for testing and using IOMEGA ZIP drives. I downloaded an improved driver for my parallel Zip drive and got about an 8 fold performance increase!
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>But it is extremely scary to find out you've been exposed to the outside world without your knowledge!

Thanks for the additional info, Fred. Steve's site is certainly a gem. BTW I'm going to go looking for that improved driver, I've got a ZIP drive attached to an ECP parallel port and it still performs like a dog even after running the accelerator program.