That's strange maclean, I've been using that acme app since it first showed up in the forums a year or so ago. It is a Java app and does put a strain on my system too but there shouldn't be any 'spyware' effects from it (I'm pretty tight on that crap too). When I only had 650Mhz/128RAM I couldn't be running anything else when I used it or it would lock my system. But for brick textures it's awsome - Oh, and yes you do have to be on-line to use it, it pulls the patterns/samples off their server real-time and probably does run some kind of usage-log on their side too.