I don't think it broke off, but malfunctioned (or somehow, the software hit a glitch that managed to override it, if that is possible). I had been playing the game for hours, and each time it tried to write the high score, it would think it wrote, but when the high score board was shown, nothing was saved. Then on one occasion, it actually wrote to it (confirmed that it wasn't just stored in memory as I still have the write protected disk to this day with my high score saved on it). The following game rounds it went back to failing to actually write to the disk. That was literally, the ONLY occasion that the drive in question ever pulled that trick, so I doubt anything was "broken" on the drive, just that it malfunctioned the one time. It has been a head scratcher for me ever since. I never knew if it was a sensor malfunction, or if somehow the software overrode the drive's write protect (which for some nagging reason I thought was possible, as I thought I had non writeable disks [one with no notch at all] that could be written to to register software... but I might be wrong on that). My other (and more plausable theory) is that my write protect sticker had enough play in it, that a physical switch sensor might have been right on the verge of writeable (although, I don't know if those drives used a finger as a sensor, or a light beam, or how far a finger has to pass thru the disk to see it as writable) -chris <http://www.mythtech.net>