I was trying to restore it on the SAME system, configured the SAME way. But it still did not work. The backup config option for ISA 2000 seems to be worthless, since I cannot restore it. What do you do if your system totally dies and you have to rebuild it? if you did not manually document all the setting and configurations you made in ISA, you are out of luck. That's why I was hoping that there was some utility out there that would just allow me to read the configuration file as text and then I could manually configure ISA again - just like I had it before, since it won't restore the config. -Tom