First off, you missed the point. My ISP drops the connection every 2 hours. It is part of the contract. If I lived 3/4 km closer to the local telephone exchange, I could get an ADSL line and not have that problem. Moving the house closer isn't an option. I'm unfortunately stuck with dialup until the local satalitte broadband isp gets enough sign-ups to make it worth his investment.

But, as annoying as that is, that wasn't the problem I was identifying with putty. The problem is that when a putty session ends for whatever reason, the window sits there dead. I cannot ask it to re-connect. The best I can do is ask it to duplicate the session, which starts another window leaving the old one redundant on the desktop. Why it doesn't have a re-connect option eludes me. It would also be nice to be able to configure it to remember the userid for each host, save me re-typing that, but I can't find an option for this.

On the upside, I have discovered a solution to the ISP problem. A utility called 'screen', which is a kind of window manager for console sessions. Besides all the neat features of allow you to switch between several active sessions, leaving the programs running there running and capturing the scrollback for you. It's neatest trick is that if the connection is severed, when you reconnect, one command 'screen -x', and you are right back where you left off. No need to remember to nohup your long running commands. No need for multiple putty sessions. ^AC starts a new session. ^A^A switces between the last two. Lots of other nice stuff. Now, If I could only map ^A^A to ^TAB, I'd be laughing:)