Philip TAYLOR writes:

[...] there are ten million computers in the world running *X, and each and every one of them has different libraries, different compilers, different versions, different this, different that, different everything.

I'm using Gentoo Linux, a source code distribution, and I'm glad to see how good it works. I'm not a C programmer and I'll certainly have a problem if not everything compiles without manual interaction. But everything works perfectly. Yes, there are many different libraries with different version numbers. But it doesn't matter because programs usually know which (versions of) libraries they need. There are different versions of .DLL files on Windows too, unfortunately the file name doesn't contain the version number. If people always use standard tools to install software, the installer certainly looks into the .DLL file and prevents a recent version from being replaced by an older one. But there are people you called monkeys in a previous mail. And there are many monkeys in the Windows world. I often get CDs containing data sheets. They usually contain PDF files. Some of them come with a toc file in HTML, but some require that you have to install them, whatever this means. Some even require that you have admin rights. These CDs go into the trash can immediately. Either they want to break my system deliberately, what I don't believe because they want me to buy their products, or they are what you call monkeys. I doubt that anybody who doesn't know what an admin account is good for is able to install software on my system properly. There are probably monkeys in the UNIX world too, but I think that the fact that shared libraries provide the version number in the file name is much more robust than the Windows approach (which is definitely not monkey proof). What you said about UNIX was an assumption. If you have some time, why not install a Linux system, maybe on a virtual machine, and play with it? You'll see that all your assumptions are wrong. There are many Linux distributions available but I think that Gentoo is the best one for you because, as far as I know you, it's imortant for you to know how things work. You have to do things manually while other distributions provide menus. But you immediately see how things work. I really hope that you find some time to play with it.

Yes, there is a ?registry? tweak that will stop explorer from trying to enumerate remote (networked) files; it is a pain, and I completely agree. When I find the reference, I'll forward it to you (and your administrators !).

That would be nice. The problem exists on XP but not on 9x. My first assumption was that it is a DNS problem but specifying the IP number instead of the hostname didn't help. I now also believe that there is something wrong either in the network setup or the registry. A colleague already looked into the network setup and found a few improvements but the main problem still exists. Fabrice said that the registry is a distributed database, so I assume that I can't make a backup before I edit it. Hence, I'm interested in some hints from people who know what has to be changed. Making own experiments is too dangerous. I'm on vacation at the moment, but I'll come back to the issue later.

P.S. About as "intuitive" as [con]cat[enating] a file with nothing in order simply to see it on the screen ...

You *can* [ab]use 'cat' to print a file to screen but the UNIX tool designed for this task is 'more' and not 'cat'. There is also 'less', which allows you to scroll backwards but it's probably not installed on every UNIX system. Regards, Reinhard -- ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Reinhard Kotucha Phone: +49-511-4592165 Marschnerstr. 25 D-30167 Hannover mailto:reinhard.kotucha@web.de ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Microsoft isn't the answer. Microsoft is the question, and the answer is NO. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------