Aha! Well two people familiar with the net had similar problems...Lowell is coming out of Colorado which is as far as I could get back east and even that was iffy...Washington was like slicing warm butter...Oregon was iffy and same with Norcal...worked sometimes but not always..and anywhere else in say Nevada, Central and S Cal. etal were a no go with Earthwaves a single exception...The traceroute program I used to use was UNIX based, but there are a couple I use that are Windows based...You do not have to know the DNS #, but it helps..otherwise you can do it by the name....My problem cleared up about 5 minutes after I posted the message to this system...but it was out for the two hours I was working it early this AM...Looked a lot like the old days before the web...