I wonder if it's anything to do with my geographical location (Queensland, Australia)? Judging by your Commonwealth English, you could be either in the UK (which doesn't help me much) or down in Aust. or NZ, which would help me to narrow the problem down a bit.

The epithet 6_pac tells me that you either spend a bit of time at the gym and have the ab's to prove it, or that you'll be wading into the stubbies with your mates after a hot day working on your tan at the beach this Christmas, and working on a very different species of abdomen ;->; either way, my guess is that you're as Australian as I am <g>.

Am I right? If so, then the problem's not geographical. Maybe I should be contacting my ISP. It'd be a bugger if they were instituting measures against file sharing; that was the main reason I went broadband, and satellite was the only thing available out here in the bush, with phone cables etc. so ancient that a modem connection took about three minutes to load an average webpage. But with Government-subsidised satellite for bush dwellers to the tune of a few thousand dollars, just slightly short of the entire cost of the disc on the roof, I bloody well hope it's not the ISP, because I'll be up the proverbial if it is; my contract goes for another couple of years (to make the disc pay off) and then I'll own the disc for free (thanks to the Autralian Government; they *are* good for some things <g>, despite all Howard's perpetual brown-nosing of Bush). So switching to anything else would be a major waste of expensive and otherwise fast hardware.