RE: win95 dirscan >> com1: A certain online service was the last folk to be accused of this. What was wrong with that, was they were opening a scratch file to write data into, and didn't over write the old data first, so it appeared they were 'stealing your harddrive' one sector at a time. So, win95 may be up to no good, they may be doing something careless ala the above, some simple software license checking, or the blackest deed in the universe as alluded here. Or a competitor could be starting a rumor. OTOH, if you want nasty, consider a trojan horse in software which if it detected a winsock running, would transit UPD packets over net to momma server who would collect data. I don't see this as being particularly easy to detect unless a site has a full firewall up, and then only maybe. W4W has TCP/IP? Hmmmmm. <g>.