thanx, paul. ISTR "ghost rooms" were somehow duplicates of a room in use. not sure of the details. but something weird would happen in relation to them. jeez, I also didn't know that robots would be able to enter those IRC channels. the part about the IP address is not a major worry, if everybody knows each other, they're all friends, nobody's a script kiddie. here, you see, they have to hide one's IP address due to privacy concerns, so there's no way for script kiddies to launch a DOS attack on a specific machine of a specific user, if they happen to say something the script kiddie doesn't like :lol: but as you say, in the seedier neighbourhoods of the IRC (rare as they might be), that sort of privacy protection mightn't exist. if a router/firewall is set up right, it's not a concern, but my concern is for those with open machines, new users who might not be set up to avoid port scans and DOS attacks. with OS X it's no big deal, and I believe it will also be automatic with vista.