Wow - I'm guessing that they didn't really get the IRQ-sharing down cold before implementation. On my Linux box, I literally haven't used the floppy drive in years - it just plugs a hole right now. My Windows laptop OTOH is a different story. (I transfer between the two via FTP on my home network.) eirian is right - My Inspiron 8100 came from Dell w/ XP pre-installed (even though I had refused it and got the discount to boot), though it never ran on this machine. I fdisked the hard drive from floppy and installed Win2k on it. The reason why is simple: I've messed with XP on others' machines, and I don't like XP's paternalistic "here, don't touch that setting, moron - let Daddy do it for you" attitude. You can't tweak jack on it. I also hated the idea that it had to dial in and tell MS about my computer and then get permission to "activate" before it would boot. Bleah... ('k, end of XP rant, promise.) As for 'security features', this has been an ongoing struggle long before Windows existed... I mean does anyone else remember seeing Commodore 64 Nibbler disks? The best feature I had seen only worked half-arsed; Quake3 has CD-Keys, and there can only be one key active on the Internet at a time. Sure, folks found alternate keys, but casual copying dropped to pretty much nil because no one wanted to see their access denied online. 'course, Poser doesn't have an online component, nor should it. Their best bet would be to use something akin to what 3DS Max uses - a hardware key. Yes it can be hacked, but also, from what I've seen of students' hacked copies (more accurately, from what I've had to clean out of my lab machines), those hacks will eat at least 50% of your CPU cycles just to keep the print spooler fooled into thinking there's a hardwawre key present. They keys are small, they're discreet, and it'll keep casual copying to an absolute minimum... prolly won't add but a dollar or two to the total cost. Just don't lose the key :/ /P