meg recently gave me a cuecat she had lying around, and I played around with it tonight. Thanks to the Internet, I found custom drivers in a matter of minutes and I was scanning in bar codes at will. I even found some scripts (with great notes!) to do exactly what I want to do: build a book cataloging system. What I couldn't find was a nice Visual Basic program with a nice user interface to make it all easy for folks who don't program. (I feel a new project coming on.)