Gerhard Yes, I sent both infected messages and they were to two totally unrelated people - both never emailed before. That's why I'm a bit scared. I'm assuming both are PC's and perhaps their antivirus software is seeing viruses. The one also thought my email was spam. I think it's just the one drive doing this but due to the virus scenario, I haven't tried any others. The drive did work just fine last week for downloading. I have now trashed the suspect virus attachment also. I'm wondering if 'just having it on the system' could have buggered things. The startup disk (Emac internal) had 4.4-10GB of space. The external had 65-119GB during these problems as I captured DV to it. But I did have the camcorder and firewire external plugged into both emac firewire ports. I'll try daisychaining next time. Thanks for your responses Lynn