Maybe this is old hat, but sorry, I'm not up on game stuff. My son was installing a game for me (after saving the world using crypto during the day, I like to own b*tch*s for about 30 min a night just to wind down...) and the game required us to install PunkBuster. I demurred and did a quick search. It seems that punkbuster is rather aggressive and there are claims that it will upload a txt file to their server, if it looks to be of interest. I was horrified, naturally. My son's pc gets regularly infested and restored from a partition image, and he does not keep any sensitive information on it, so pb is fine for him. But I have to be a little more circumspect. Anyone know about pb? All I know is that it is pretty standard, but not actually owned by any big game producer. If there's a question mark over it, then I'll have to put the game on an isolated machine. Mike N