Hi Cwn!
I understand your dislike of third party programs. I tend to only use ctraid myself, and only the bare minimum of that suite as well, just to get by with raids. I don't like too much deviation from the Blizzard setup, and I've been afraid of getting any bad viruses or just bad code on my machine, in addition to my worry about any extra bandwidth being taken up (I'm on dial up typically - it sucks). But even with that, I *do* recommend using ctraid. I've done a couple of runs of MC without it, and it does give a bit of help to the raid. You can easily get by in everything from UBRS on down without it and never miss it, but it helps for the 20 and 40 man instances with the mt setup (cause trying to find the correct target otherwise sucks - bad) and getting 'you are about to die' messages. I've got aditional reasons for using it, but those are healer/shammy related. I've never had a problem with the ctraid software, and this is on a standard Windows XP install *and* for my Mac OSX install. The coders seem to know what they're doing.