Though I've never used Nortons a-v, I'm informed on pretty good authority that these days it's very important to use one of the later generations of a-v that intercept emails BEFORE they are loaded onto your hard drive. In the case of Klez and similar, these virus/worms/trojans are self-executing so will do their dirty tricks as soon as they are downloaded into your system without any intervention on your part. Earlier a-v programs scan emails AFTER they have arrived into your system, thus may be ineffective against this new type of self-executing virus, worm, or whatever you like to call such scunge. I suspect this may be a major difference between Nortons 2001 and 2002 engines, and probably accounts for the apparent slowdown, as each email obviously has to isolated and scanned before being permitted to write to the hard drive. Obviously this has to be slower than a process which first admits the email, then scans it at leisure while the next email is downloading. Ergo, Ian's "treacle". Only a guess on my part. There could be other reasons. Certainly, older a-v engines are not picking up the latest forms of Klez. Anybody running OE would be well advised to ensure that they have the latest a-v engines---it's not enough simply to have updated a-v data files. For full independent technical reports on the relative merits of the various a-v programs, go to the Virus Test Center at Hamburg University at: http://agn-www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/vtc/ You will find some very interesting reading there. This page is currently updated to 5 April 2002, the latest test being March 2002. Be warned---there's an awful lot of reading and info available. Interestingly, they publish a-v tests going right back to 1994! Their testing procedures are very stringent, and the results are very detailed. There are many more a-v programs than most of us have ever heard of, unfortunately not all of them seem to be in English. Don Penlington Free computer tutorials at: http://www.geocities.com/donaldpen/ Also Fractal Galleries, free icons, poetry, and beautiful Queensland beaches. The NOSPIN Group is now offering Free PC Tech support at our newest website: http://freepctech.com