i had a Direct Cable Connection running between my win2k laptop and my win98 desktop and it was running fine (albeit extremely slow) for a week. I gave it a rest for a week, and went back to it... only thing that i can think of that changed over the interim was that the laptop was now identified in another workgroup.. that's easily taken care of, you can specify what workgroup or domain you need to logon to for the DCC... but now it disconnects after any very short period of inactivity... i have to literally jump on the next file transfer once i've transfered one batch... or it just plain disconnects... is there any reason this would have to do with them being in different workgroups? is there anything else that i might have changed that is causing this to occur? thanks for your help.