Here is a different take about the AV companies profiting from the virus scare (which I believe is real). Recently, a large, mainstream AV company started blocking our customers from downloading our product from our web site. They reported that they had detected a threat in it that they called WS.Reputation.1. But they more than just warned the user; they automatically quarantined the file and told the user that they had deleted it to protect the user's computer. It turns out, you can Google it, that WS.Reputation.1 is not a virus or malware of any kind! It is just this company's way of saying that so few of their customers have downloaded this file that they do not have enough data to know whether or not it has adversely affected those who have downloaded it. It took me over a week to get our installer added to their "white list" for the current version. Now, every time we release an updated version we have to go through the process again of getting it approved and added to their white list. I am wondering if it would be incorrectly marked as infected if I bought a digital signing certificate and signed the code. Oh yeah, guess who is one of the biggest sellers of digital certificates?

Here is one observation from my experience. If any of your users have a slow network connection (read psuedo-high-speed satellite internet) than the mapped drive solution poses another problem. Every time they un-minimize *any* Windows Explorer window, it will have to re-resolve the network connection to that mapped network drive and will cause a delay (sometimes serious delay) restoring the file system view. For this reason, I always go with UNC paths. Dave Smith