but actually upon further examination, one of the programs i have used in the past, has this std dev function. furthermore, there are a few different revisions of this said encrypted file. each of these different revisions have an expected outcome. once you compute the files std dev and compare that with the known expected values, usually if it is within a generally close range, then that means the file is not corrupted. and i am not saying this is the end all be all of how to check a file for corruption, but somehow this other program is able to compute it and it is within a reasonably expected range... everytime... and per revision of the file, unless the file is corrupted. maybe i need to script up something real quick and just check to see what the outcome will be :)