just a quick thanks to bart b for yor reply! as for my 'mysterious ' and hghly sophisticated password construction, the answer , honestly , is as follows- i selected 5 numbers at random , dice throw. picked onr at random, looked at the corresponind bookshelf in my sitting room , picked another book from another random number pick, then used six multiples of the 5 random number to select 6 pages from book- used a further 10 random numbers to select 10 word positions therein- ultimately, after a lot of time i ended up with a 40 letter random key. suffices to say i need to get out more/work more/ something!! thanks again !