Yes, it's so much more fun to blame keystone kops or incompetent service providers for any sort of slowdown, rather than accept that scaling is hard once you've passed size large. The danger to the kops in question is that anyone who actually solves the problem of increasing both the amount of processing time per unit and the number of units processed is likely to make alot more money in private industry, still, even in the wake of the collapse of the equity bubble. Sean.