To all those who replied and offered help, I thank you but as you will see, everyone's ideas were wide of the mark. To sum up the problem, when I bypassed my router and connected the ethernet output of the broadband equipment direct to my computer, I could no longer access most https sites. The matter was further complicated by my limited amount of troubleshooting time available. I followed several dead ends but this morning, after a really long sleep, I plugged the cable into the Win7 box and it did the same. Since this action wasn't normal, I finally smelled a giant rat in the form of an ISP and called tech support and the %$#!! first tier tech support dude had a process for that!!! Go figure ... they only authenticate to the first known MAC address in their list, in this case the old router. Well, by the time we were done, my new Asus gigabit router (which hadn't worked when I first tried to use it - HAH!) worked just fine, everything was up and running and my download speed was still sucky but not by as much. Damn their screwy system but at least the problem was solved. Thanks again - Fred -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org