Agree with your synopsis of QT's compression and quality.

DIVX seems to have begun the improvements in Media formats.

As for ITunes, yup. Might want to dig deep into your O/S, it's somewhat worse than the old AOL loads when it comes to finding places to hide. Realplayer used to be as bad, or worse.

I spent three days scraping the ITunes residue out of my Granddaughter's computer when it got installed. When I was finished I came to the conclusion it would have been easier to reformat and reinstall Windowz.

If I ever get over this damned B strain of Flu I am going to dig out that old PII box and load the freebie Ubuntoo LINUX CD that I got yesterday. With further research I’ve found all sorts of freeware neato-keeno apps that eliminate the need for most of these programs and problems they cause. One does have to be careful though, the uber-geeks in the black-hat world like to add little bits of interesting code to shareware on occasion.

With the proper application of liberal doses of caffeine, revived code-slinging skills and a few dead-tree manuals, maybe I can free myself from the enslavement to Redmond’s bloatware.

(Yeah, I know, you have to use it.)