"So in light of Zone Alarm and other protections I use, I fail to see how my computer activities and software can fowl up other computers. Perhaps you can explain? - J Dent" Hello all! My client base ranges from individuals at home to small office businesses (Real estate, contractors, Bed & Breakfasts, etc). Most of these folk have no desire to understand how and why a computer works. They, especially the business people, just want them to work right. They have never heard of Zonealarm and have no idea what a firewall is. They are surprised and upset when I run Adaware or some such on their computer and find hundreds of exploits. In some cases, their anti-virus is out of date. All my clients, once I have them under my wing, keep their anti-virus up to date, have a firewall, and run Adaware and Spybot Search & Destroy weekly (well, at least they are told to update and run them weekly). Whatever the numbers actually are, there is a sizeable chunk of computers out there that have little or no protection against all the nasties. SP2 is a big step towards defending these otherwise hapless machines. Will it cause problems? Of course it will. Yesterday I read that it was thought to be problematic in about 10% of all Windows XP computers. Along with that report, it was stated that most of those problems were "small" (undefined). And, that computers with malware on them were far more likely to have issues with SP2 than a clean machine (that from Sunbelt Software). I have advised my business clients to wait a bit before installing SP2, just to be sure. They all, however have protection similar to Mr. Dent's. I have also told them to check with the vendors of any software they depend on that might break in SP2 (Like UPS Worldship, real estate web sites, legal software, etc). Within a month, I will advise them all to update to SP2 if nothing horrible happens in the meantime. Sorry for the length of this, but... Mr. Dent: your machine is well protected because you know what to do (mind you, if a new virus appears that uses the buffer overflow issues that has been largely corrected by SP2, you might reconsider). However for most computer owners, they do not have the time nor the inclination to be as knowledgeable as we are. In my book, SP2 is a necessity for them. Thanks for listening. Will Stephenson Acadia Technologies Inc. mailto:[log in to unmask] There are as many paths to God as there are people to walk them. "Hold No Punches.." Rode brings you great shareware/freeware programs with his honest opinions in this weekly column. http://freepctech.com/rode