Hi Ben and Stephen, Good to hear from you both and thanks for forwarding that mail; I left Alphatech about 4 years ago... Anyway, I spent a bunch of time on this yesterday, but just as I was about to send an email detailing all of that, absolutely convinced it was xemacs' fault, I decided to do one more test and have now absolved xemacs. I can reproduce the problem from a shell as follows: CVS_RSH=ssh /usr/bin/cvs diff <<file>> 2>&1 Some combination of CVS_RSH=ssh and combining cvs' stdout and stderr together causes the problem. Of course the xemacs process code defaults to combining the two streams. The result is dramatic - if I run "find ." in a loop in another window from my home directory while running cvs repeatedly, bytes are almost always lost, and sometimes I only get 10% of the bytes. Using the same cvs and ssh executables that work on my RH 6.2 box, I can still reproduce the problem on my RH 7.3 box. Argh. Anyway, thanks for your time and best wishes, Greg