David Hansen wrote: No, it is not that we do not perceive any possible problems. I at least believe that there will be problems. But I don't believe there will be major ones. And I certainly don't believe that they will happen all suddenly on 1/1/00. Possible. And may affect telephones. But water, gas and electricity suppliers won't have the staff to go out and cut everyone off, since this has to be done physically at the premises. Besides, such a huge number of disconnections will be noticed and the cause identified. Are you sure this is legal? A couple of years ago the National Savings Bank (as it was in the UK) were saying that they had accounts that had been inactive for over eighty (yes, 80) years with a few shillings in but they couldn't close them because they couldn't trace the owners or their heirs. (BTW Nat Savings never paid interest on balances less than a pound, so a few shillings 80 years ago is still a few * 5p today) AFAIK there is nothing in any contract I take out with a bank that says that if I deposit money and leave it there for over 2 years they are entitled to it. I come back 10 or 20 years later expecting to retrieve my savings. Yes, I did this with my German bank account in 1995 having not touched it since (I think) 1985. It was still there and I could still draw money out when on holiday in Germany. Yes, empty accounts may well vanish, and rightly so! This has _already happened_ and will be addressed long before 2000. IIRC a chain of supermarkets in the UK was asked by a tinned (canned) food supplier why they were suddenly ordering three times the usual amount of tomatoes. It turned out that the warehouse was accepting tinned tomatoes each day; overnight the stock check found that they were out of date ("best before end feb 00" or something) and ditched them, and the following day more were ordered. It is not something that suddenly happens in 2000. May happen. But the first manifestations of the bug will have turned up already - temporary contracts that expire in 2 or 3 years for example. Our accounting, job control etc. system uses 2 digit dates. Last year (or the year before - I forget) a lot of work was done on our system and a 2 digit date is now assumed to lie between 1950 and 2049. As Tony and others have pointed out, this will probably occur. But it is relatively easy to override manually until sorted out. Credit card companies - I forget who told this one from personal experience - hit the bug a year ago with cards that _expired_ in 00. This made them do all the necessary work then. While I concede that it is possible that there may be a few bugs left in (spurious late payment penalties for example), I doubt that accounts will disappear (and who will care? I'm not going to fuss if a lot of money I owe is forgotten about ;-) ). I know this is another "assumption" - that having hit the one bug they did all the work to cure the others - but I think the evidence points that way. Damn! This discussion is way off topic and I wasn't going to join in. Oh well, I've typed it now. Philip.