i was a contractor for a global services company for a couple of yrs and most of "our" clients used large LANs w/racks - sometimes a large room filled w/racks - of hubs, albeit typically smart hubs; so there's gotta be something giving on that. maybe a price/performance issue... at any rate, for my lab purposes i'm pretty sure hubs are what i need, but b4 it comes time to drop the dimes i'll do a needs analysis comparing hubs & switches. thanks for the input.

(btw, who's calling the kettle black here on posting in English, dude! :p )