I've tried all these chat proggies. AOL sux! I guess thats everone else's opinion too. Used ICQ for quite a while, but thats easy to exploit, and with ready made software now freely available, i got a lil worried after i got a couple of DOS attacks. MSN is good, however, (personal xperience) i keep getting knocked off if i'm idle for a long time. got a Cable connection, so i keep it on for most of the time i'm online, and i keep getting disconnected after a couple of hours. i wuld say Yahoo is the best!! It's got voice and webcam functions, NEVER gets disconnected, the icons are much better, and the status messages can be modified. as far as security goes, it's pretty solid, even tho it's a P2P messenger, (like ICQ, and unlike MSN) it does not compromise ur security. These are just my opinions, as a user, no expert advice, coz i am no expert.