Hi Tim, Yeah, I don't really understand it either. I have asked my uni to look into it (several months back ... probably October last year), but have not as yet received a reply. One of the system admins did mention to my in passing he was experiencing the same problem when connecting from home, not directly connecting at the uni. So I was hazard a guess its something to do with their firewall or something. A friend of mine suggestions writing a script which, on logging in to the remote machines, automatically performs a task (i.e. display a list of people logged in and write this to a file which is continually overwritten as so that the file does not impinge greatly on my quota) every 5 minutes as to keep the connection alive. Would anyone be able to offer some hints / suggestions as to how this may be done? I have had a go myself, but (as usual) failed miserably. Thanks again. All the best. Cheers, Tony Crouch
