Well, I think that I agree more with Andy than with you Craig. Yeah, it's true that USB is complicated. But all the problems you mention don't have to do with USB itself and its complexity, but with fast and buggy implementations or with marketing (e.g. Windows vs Linux vs Mac OS X vs Mac OS 9, etc, etc...). As Andy said, we are engineers and not the average user. And of course the target group is the average users... From our part as engineers, if we want to design with USB then we have to study some more...

For me the problem isn't the USB complexity, but as you said Craig the gradual replacement of RS-232 by USB. I am really pissed off with that!!! What if tomorrow comes the new super duper IEEE 2144 bus/connection that will be better than USB and Firewire? Will I have to buy new converters such as USB-to-RS232? And we have seen that: ISA, PCI, AGP, PCI-Express or EDO, SDR, DDR, DDR2... And if you can't avoid these changes, then you can avoid the replacement of RS232 by USB and that by Firewire and that by whatever... Afterall its a worthless connector damn it! Why don't you put it and you remove it from our motherboards or from our laptops? Hmm, it seems that the average user isn't going to use RS232 anymore, so multiply those 50 cents by some million and you 'll see why they remove the DB9 connectors. Oh, these average users!

George