hehehe, yes, your firewall could have caused you to not be able to ping also depending on your setup (grin) forgot about that one! I also figured you'd know whether or not you were connected. (another smile hey,it's a valid reason!!) Some servers that run slow (um, hmmm) will turn off icmp packet receiving on their end to reduce traffic they deem unecessary or detrimental. Mean's you can ping till the cows come home but never get a response even though you can tracert (or traceroute) to them. Glad you stayed with the conversation :) You'll find this stuff comes in handy when you want to figure out why you can't go where you want on the net or why you seem to be going the looooooong way around!!