Thanks Mikie, again! It is the same one I tried to install. It has their toolbar. Its almost impossible to get rid of it once installed. They have made it mandatory to take their seach toolbar with the free ZA. Probably even throw it in with the paid version. Last year you could install by clicking 'skip all offers' but even clicking it installs the search toolbar. I'm running Win XP and need a firewall. Jane

My heart truly breaks for you!!! Especially knowing what it takes to accumulate, maintain and use home food storage to begin with. If I were in your situation I would... 1. Contact Brigham Young University for more information. They test these foods under different conditions and should be a good resource. 2. There may be help available through the LDS Church in your area, as well, and I would certainly pursue them for more information. 3. You might also want to check with the companies you order your food from. If you have any luck getting some definitive information, would you please share it if you have the time? The USDA guidelines I have from Food Safety Classes I have in my file contend with "regular" food (freezer/refrigerator/canned goods, etc.), but not a lot about hermetically-sealed freeze-dried foods or bulk grain. Sorry I couldn't be more help... -Grainlady

Deee, me too. Thank you, everyone. Marina, I hadn't heard of Sara Ward but just looked up her web site. I will keep an eye on her site to see if she's speaking anywhere around me. dlm, good question with a long answer but will try to be brief. Lots of difficulty with friendship until he was in HS. He was in special ed schools until HS, then went to a regular HS but very small and welcoming to kids with "learning differences." Anyway, he found some good friends there and has held onto a couple of them. Then when he went to college briefly, he made a couple of friends who he is still friends with. In the last two years he has really managed to find a few good friends who are quirky but functioning (I mean, none of them are teachers or lawyers, but they are working musicians or artists or bartenders....). Mostly guys but he does have a couple of girls who are friends. He has had a couple of girlfriends and the last one was a disaster of epic proportions but I won't say more about that here. Most of the friends he's made over the past 2-3 years have been a few years older than him. All have their own apts. so he mainly goes to their places and we don't really see them, so it's hard to describe the dynamics of these relationships. When we do meet his friends, they always seem quirky but very nice. I think the linked article explains NLD/NVLD pretty well. DS doesn't have every feature, but definitely has most, including physical awkwardness (never played sports, trips up or down stairs, etc), OCD tendencies, dominates conversations, lousy hygiene, etc. Some of the features he had when he was younger but not as much now, possibly because he has been in therapy since he was 6 years old!? Here is a link that might be useful: description

Once again someone has disagreed with you and you just cannot seem to let it go, even when the disagreement is largely a matter of opinion or terminology. You accept that piggyback downloads is a reasonable practice of a responsible company. I feel that it is sufficient to make a company worthy of the label "Slightly Slimy", irrespective of how many other companies of whatever size also follow the practice. You claim they've always been safe, excepting of course for the times when haven't been. That to me is not reassuring. Furthermore you cannot categorically state they've always been safe, you may not have had any problems in the dozen or hundred or thousand or however many times you've used the site, but that is anecdotal evidence, which in most other realms you would take someone to task for relying on. Lastly, given that their safety has been demonstrated to be less than 100% in the past, by your own admission, unless they have changed their policies to ensure that no compromised files can reside on their system, any given download could be the next one that has been compromised. While I think it is a reasonable expectation that any given file downloaded from Cnet would be safe, it is still prudent to verify that a given file is safe. To that end I have taken steps to conclusively determine that the copy of Irfanview currently hosted on the Cnet download site is (at least as of last Thursday) identical to the one offered directly from the Irfanview webpage. Which I feel is actually useful information to the original poster of this thread. You have merely asserted that they are safe, and have always have been safe, based on your anecdotal experience and your knowledge that they are owned by a large corporation, and attacked anyone who dares suggest that may not be so.