Thanks, E
I'll look that over.
I've got the missplaced post thing going myself lately. There's a little flag that shows up in the title bar of the post one is replying to, and I keep forgetting to check for it. I think I might need glasses. Damn.
I've paid for such products. The TOPO! program from National Geographic is a great topo program using data from the USGS. I own disks for several states. Quite inexpensive for what it does. But as you point out, they just repackaged data supplied "free" by the USGS. Google Earth taps into servers from multiple goverment agencies' databases.