stuartbe,
thanks for the welcome
, i've just been lurking since the demise of .com.
i don't think the proxies are the (whole) problem for me, as traffic other than web is affected - telnet sessions time out, FTP sesions hang, VPN will not connect etc.
As for the inktomis, I switched a while ago to use brentford proxies (BRE) seems to work quite well <he says putting kiss of death on them>.
cheers