Bill, thank you for your help. You seem to understand my quandry. I am a consultant, and NOT a SS expert. I work from home, and my SS db is not supported by the client's IT folks, though I do get advice from the guy who set it up for me (client owns the license and the server, I manage it day to day...)

My IT contact is off until Monday, I may just have to wait for him. The client outsources 100% of its sysadmin (AD, Windows support, etc.) to India, and while those guys are sometimes willing, it always takes up a lot of precious time.

What I was looking for was "standard" practice. If you set up a SS in an AD environment, and SQL Server Agent will need to access a network share, what account would one use? The account I did use works for non-network-share stuff (I'm not sure why...) but when I tried to add "WINNTDOM\sqlserveragent" to the group with access to the network share, it failed saying the account was not a user.... I also tried forward slash...

There is a "global" account called "sqlserveragent", but I don't know the password for it, etc. I guess I'll have to wait for my IT guy to come back on monday.