Those of us who "strongly dislike" the MS Office Assistant --
the intrusive animation of a paper clip -- can take heart in
a story on CNN:

  "Brian Valentine, general manager of the Application and Tools Group at
   Microsoft, and product manager Tom Rizzo showed developers how to get
   rid of the agent with a line of Visual Basic code that Microsoft will
   post to its Web site for downloading."

The full story is at:

   < http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9810/16/clipdeath.idg/ >

--Glenn Cole
  Software al dente, Inc.
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