John,

Hmm. You'd have to have the mobo on and continually beeping; and I
wouldn't feel too happy poking round a live mobo with bare wires!

And neither would I. My thought was to take old connector with wires, wrap
the ends to the tweeters ones and tape them off (or something like that).
Probably would shut the 'puter down to move the connector to a new set of
pins. Me being a bit over-cautious ? Probably. :-)

Hmm. One side might, but I think not the other: you'd end up with +5 and 0
reversed, and I think the data lines too.

Nope, because thats the whole trick. :-) The two rows of pins on the
motherboard header are wired mirrored to each other*, so that you simply
cannot plug the (non-slotted) USB connector in a wrong orientation. Clever
guys them.

* think of two sets of connections in a circle. Just flattened.

Right, hadn't thought of that - not something I know much about; I'd
vaguely assumed it didn't need extra connections.

And AFAIK you would be assuming right. Nowerdays the WOL line is on the
card-edge connector, doing away with that cumbersome seperate cable.

Otherwise those back-to-back ones where two colours are in the same
package wouldn't be safe to themselves.

.... or the ones I we wired ourselves. I remember, when bi-colored leds
where stil pricy, soldering two flat ones together to get a squarish single
one.

As a side shoot: I believe a red LED is actually a much better voltage
reference than a Zener of that sort of voltage rating: LV Zeners have
rather "soft" curves, whereas a red LED drops about 1.8 volts pretty
precisely over quite a broad range.

I remember schematics which used a LED at the zener position. I always
assumed that it was for a "is the circuit powered" purpose though. Never
thought it would actualy work better than a purpose-build zener.

Regards,
Rudy Wieser