Pads for unplaced devices have a decidedly different appearance (in my experience) than what I see here. Usually, the pads are shiny with solder, a remnant I assume of wave soldering or some other similar manufacturing technology. For a given device, a few lead pads will be shiny, some *black*, and some kinda look lke they've been pulled up off the board. Sombody had a steady hand, I'll say that for sure. Either that, or these chips blew themselves off the board. I wish I had a photomicroscope so I could take a picture- you'd see what I mean. As I said in my post, I'm assuming he gets lots of these, and he just grabbed this one off the wrong pile. -dq