Hi Tillman,
Drop an email to support@acqura.com and I will send you my polled LPC932 I2C routine.

I can think of no reason if you were polling the I2C interface why other interrupts would have to be disabled. The 'usual' reasoning seems to be to minimise the down time in I2C traffic caused by other ISR processing.

The I2C bus is naturally tolerant of such behaviour by allowing the clock to stretch (the I2C bus clock is spec'ed from 0 (DC) to 100kHz (400kHz)) while other processing is performed. The thing to watch is that some intellegent peripherals (i.e. those based on controllers) will enter an error state if they believe the bus to have hung. The simple perpiherals you have been discussing don't time out, so I see no problems with what you are suggesting.

Best regards,
Graham