@Tammy: No, you do not need a phone line for initial guided service. I still have my Series 1 SA with Turbonet ethernet card. I've had to rebuild it several times after disk failures. I just plug in the dialing prefix that tells the Tivo to use DHCP over the ethernet connection. Matter of fact, I have to do it this way, my Tivo's modem is fried.

I've kept the dialup going because I was told that if I have it on a network, then everything in my house will be vulnerable to any viruses that TiVo might pull in. Is this not true?

Do you still need a phone line to do the initial set up? It's been two years since I've had to set up a new Tivo so I don't know if it's changed.

Well, it isn't something TiVo has much control over. TiVo doesn't run their own dial-up network - even the big ISPs like AOL and Earthlink don't. That's all outsourced to network providers who build the dial-up POPs and resell the capacity wholesale.

But dial-up is dying, rapidly, in all markets - look at the contraction in the dial-up ISP market, AOL losing customers, etc. So these POP network providers are shutting down the lesser used POPs to cut costs.