What's so bad, Orio, is that it isn't the honest to Ghu hackers that wreak so much damage; it's the waxy-eared little script kiddies, who couldn't hack their way out of a wet McDonald's Egg McMuffin wrapper if their lives depended on it. And yeah, 982kXP Lite is a wonderful way to avoid the Microsoft Service Pack nonsense, Yank IE, Outlook, Scripting Host, MS Java machine, and you've borked 99.88% of the access points that the twinks can use. The only one really left is the inherent TCP/IP trouble, and a nice firewall, and preferably a router with NAT or an actual server box doing the same function fixes that little red wagon but good. And the really evil thing is that all you have to do is copy out the very first IE registry key, then reinsert it after all the IE crud is gone, and you have the one key that all the installers that howl that you 'need IE 5+ and you don't have it so I'll install it for you or quit now!' search for, and if they find it, the app installs just fine. That doesn't include things like MS Office, of course; the dependencies are a bit more involved, and I use WordPerfect anyway, but even those apps using IE as an interface GUI seem to install just fine. You lose all the nifty eye candy, and get a GUI of Windows default, but it still works... And Don't forget to include Opera in the list of alternative browsers that work so much better than IE.....not to mention being skinnable for coolness...