Whatever you want to call it, BugNet said its raison d'etre is simple: "To comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable," according to its editor and publisher, Bruce Brown.

BugNet, which touts itself as "the global authority on PC bugs, glitches, incompatibilities and other fixes," started out as a traditional print newsletter in Sumas, Wash., in November 1994. It was less than a week before the infamous Intel Corp. Pentium chip bug surfaced.

Although BugNet didn't break that story, Brown said the launch's timing was impeccable. "It was definitely a good time to hit the streets."

BugNet's aim in 1994, as it is today, is to provide information on bugs in popular off-the-shelf software and networking products, he said. He also said the service fills a need the industry has ignored. "What you see with BugNet is an enterprise that has addressed an issue which is very high on the user's agenda but has really not been on the agenda of the industry itself," Brown said.

BugNet is an online-only publication, although some of its stories and "Bug of the Day" articles appear regularly in The Seattle Times, The Denver Post, The Houston Chronicle and other publications worldwide. In addition to the software glitches that are uncovered by his staff of about a dozen, Brown said his office receives news of glitches every day from all over the world. It publishes information on nearly 500 bugs a month.

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"In 1994, a big month would have seen 200 reports," he said. "Now, 500 is getting to be the norm."

When a bug is uncovered, like the one discovered June 23 in the latest versions of Microsoft Word for Windows 95 (see story), an alert is posted on BugNet's site. "We make a lot of stuff available for free, such as bug alerts. Like the lion with the thorn in his paw, we want to help people so they think kindly of us the next time through," Brown said.

But he isn't totally altruistic with the information that BugNet posts online. "To be able to search the whole thing and have it on demand, you need to be a paying customer," he said. Subscribers, whose bills start at $65 a year, have full access to BugNet's database, stories and analysis.

BugNet's relationship with software vendors is admittedly complex "but one that works," Brown said. "Clearly, on the one hand, they don't want bad publicity or anything that makes them look bad. But on the other hand, we help them in a lot of ways. We provide a service and put out information, which decreases their [technical support] call load to an extent. We're out there intercepting people who would otherwise be on the phone to them."

Brown may be right about that. Surprisingly, vendors such as Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft Corp., which is targeted fairly regularly on BugNet, had nothing bad to say about the publication. "We value any service that provides proactive information to our customers," said Eileen Crain, a manager in Microsoft's technical support section.

Despite a seemingly endless stream of BugNet alerts that target Microsoft applications, she said, the company doesn't think it is being unfairly targeted. "We just have more software out there than a lot of the other vendors," she said.

Even with Microsoft's approval, some people question whether BugNet's alerts overstate or sensationalize its findings. One industry analyst said the service sometimes exaggerates software glitches.

"They have a tendency to take some small issues and expand them into issues that appear to be far more dramatic than they otherwise would be. And that, of course, is a problem because it damages their credibility," said Rob Enderle, an analyst at Giga Information Group in Cambridge, Mass.

However, even Enderle gave BugNet credit for the work it does. "The bottom line is that they're catching an awful lot of problems that might not otherwise be caught," he said.

Although he refused to provide an exact number, Brown said he has "several thousand subscribers" on six continents, split nearly evenly between corporations and individuals. Some of the bigger customers include Fortune 500 companies such as Seattle's The Boeing Co., New York-based Goldman Sachs & Co., and Chicago's Sara Lee Corp.

Not only that, software vendors ranging from Microsoft to smaller firms such as Micronet Associates CDP, Inc. in Herndon, Va., are on the company's digital mailing list. Micronet has fewer than a dozen employees. One major reason software firms subscribe, Brown said, is so they can gather corporate intelligence.

"BugNet is perhaps the only legal way for some of these vendors to find out what grief their competitors are experiencing at any given moment," he said. "And this has strategic value."

Although BugNet has sold advertising space to corporations including Lake Success, N.Y-based Canon USA, Inc., which was its last big advertiser, Brown said the publication now runs without ads.

"This is really a subscription-based model, and keeping it this way sidesteps some conflicts," he said. He pointed out that one such problem arose when Canon ads were posted along with a few alerts on that company's products.

"They were a little agitated, but they didn't pull their ads," he said. In addition to subscriptions, Brown said BugNet makes a large chunk of its revenue from its syndicated material.