One day, when I ran the Harvard Chemistry computing facility, I was greeted on my way in by panicked profs and grad students that the big VMS VAX (8MB! two memory cabinets! we gave tours!) was behaving strangely I forget what probably crawling. A lot of its use was for long-running jobs, week plus, basically inverting matrices. So I lept into action, whipped off my heavy winter coat and tossed it onto one of the big disk drives and wham the system just halted. Static I guess. Came back ok. Problem solved. -- -Barry Shein Software Tool & Die | bzs@TheWorld.com | http://www.TheWorld.com Purveyors to the Trade | Voice: +1 617-STD-WRLD | 800-THE-WRLD The World: Since 1989 | A Public Information Utility | *oo*