The concerns were raised in a security bulletin posted to security lists last week by a programmer with the pseudonym Random Nut, who previously exposed a flaw in the Kazaa file-swapping software.

In an e-mail statement sent to CNET News.com on Monday and attributed to Earthstation 5's chief programmer "Filehoover," the company acknowledged that the security problem did exist. However, it added that the glitch had been part of an automatic remote update feature that had been removed in the new version of the program, which was available on Monday.

"We completely removed the automatic software upgrade code because--as it turns out--automatic upgrade is no longer popular as it once was because it gives people an uneasy feeling and rightly so," Filehoover wrote in the statement, which was also posted on file-swapping Web forums.

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