Rumor has it that this "good-times" virus is a text file that can cause damage when read. Don't laugh. It may not be possible on more rationally-designed systems <grin> but on PC's, yes, there is such a thing as a text file that "when you read it you turn intoa toad". Or at least your hard drive does. How such a thing works... the ANSI escape codes are an inter-system set of commands to do things like change text color, font, etc. They are intended to be grabbed by the screen handler and acted on, without actually being passed tothe screen - a little like a tab code or end-of-line code. The ANSI standard ones are all quite harmless, except forthe comparatively harmless practical joke of making background & foreground the same color so you can't read the screen. The DOS handler, ANSI.SYS, however, has a few extras built in. In particular, there is one clever one that remaps the keyboard if you want to. So you can have a French or Dvorak keyboard, for inmstance. But, in a fit of overenthusiasm, they went a bit far, and allowed it to assign a *string* of characters to any key. So you can redefine the [ENTER] key to produce the string "erase *.exe". Or, presumably, to enter a little DEBUG script to create just about any machine-code program you want. Details of this nice little pistol are in all good DOS manuals, even the one you get with DOS ;-) I don't know if this can be done on other machines or not. But it certainly can [it seems] on a PC. So this apparently Dungeons-and-Dragons story should be taken seriously. Yours, Robert