that's wierd... I replied to this yesterday but realised today that the post didn't appear. That's the second time its happened to me in 2 posts...

Anyway, Tony and Paul, thanks a million for your quick replies. I later discovered the problem was actually my laptop, which for some reason is randomly dropping bytes going through the serial port. When I got home and plugged it into my home PC, I was able to restore the kernel and upgrade to latest Hijack without any problems. So I'm very very relieved about that.

Thanks again guys!

Regards,
-Dan