I don't now and never did use TurboTax (or Quicken) online, so it wasn't sneaking around my firewall on me -- being the paranoid typing I tend to unplug my network cable when not actively online anyway... but tell my software I'm still hooked up. When I first got my firewall with my broadband, I was astonished at the number of things trying to use my internet connection. And my WebWasher software catches most of the web bugs and page scripting and redirection of info that tends to go on secretly while you're surfing.

It *could*, I suppose, store data and wait 'til a connection was valid. But how would it know without trying to ping past the router?   

If you have a decent grasp of how to do taxes, you will get a much better return out of these programs, because when it asks you for deductions and credits, you know what have prepped ahead of time and stuff to look for it may not mention explicitly. Every now and then it catches a deduction I don't, which is nice, and I like creating different scenarios for depreciations, or deducting expenses on different line items, etc. Much more difficult to do with pen and paper.

Heck, I even print out my own checks (VersaCheck). I'll never go back to a manual register, but it may be time to start looking for an upstart shareware company with a decent check register program, much like Intuit was lo this many years ago.

Office XP has the same activation scheme as Windows XP, I hear, but I've only ever deal with the open licenses, which don't require activation. Actually, we have a couple of OEM licenses, and they did require activation, now that I think of it. (And it's a royal pain in the butt to get the CD out everytime you want to install an Office patch.)

John, most (if not all) IRS forms are available on the IRS web site in PDF format. No need to raid the post office.