Yes, I know I could use *nix, but frankly I don't want to. after tinkering with *nix for years, I came to the realization that *nix sucks.

Anyways, Ive been searching on and off for something that fits my needs for about a year with no good results. I have found out among other things that squid will run on windows (heresay?) but I have not found where to get it. I used to use winroute lite to do this, but I do *NOT* want routing, as I have a WRT54GSv3 with DDWRT for that now.

What I want is to use Taz (BP6 dual celeron 433, 256MB ram, 4GB+20GB HDD) as a transparent caching proxy for as many things as possible. What I mean by this is I could set up winroute lite to cache everything... and it would even grab the windowsupdate files and serve them up at LAN speed when another machine wanted them. This *REALLY* helps a fresh install of winXP to update fast, among other things. That is a good example of how thorough I want the transparent proxy to be...

Anyone got any ideas?

As far as I know, the Win XP and 2003 kernels do not support any kind method of transparent proxing. The closet thing you will get to transparent is using a group policy in a AD environment to push out proxy settings. MS has a proxy server, ISA 2004 server.

I use Squid under XP (not transparently) and it works great. The best version for windows is here... http://www.acmeconsulting.it/SquidNT/

It is a native port. If you ever figure out a transparent method under Windows, I love to hear about it.

thanks for the info. I will play with it for sure.