Another spider i've not seen before

IP: 131.107.163.49
OS: MicrosoftPrototypeCrawler (How\'s my crawling? mailto:newbiecrawler@hotmail.com)

Certainly not one that's visited me before.

Had a visit from this one too Carl and there is a lot of speculation about it on webmasterworld www.webmasterworld.com/forum11/1832.htm

I think that it is the advanced scout for the planned Microsoft challenge to Google.

I still have no idea what I am looking for in my log files to see who, when etc spidered my site.

Any hints would be appreciated.

I don't use my stats for much. My sites watch referrers, amoung other things, and they send me emails when something different happens. This together with weekly reports and affiliate stats gives me most of what i want to know. If i need more i refer to my own databases if it's referrer/IP type stuff.