yeah im aware of noconflict but in an ideal world there wouldn't be the overhead of loading prototype to begin with! ;) (especially if you dont plan on using it at all!)

Unfortunately I don't get to play in the ideal world - we're doing stuff with Magento at the moment which has Prototype+Scriptaculous so deeply baked into the both the backend _and_ frontend that it's next to impossible to use another js framework with it. I've spent most of this morning trying to resolve a conflict between JQuery and their version of Scriptaculous.

Personally I can't wait to see SS move away from Prototype .

I switched over a bloated frontend site that used Prototype+Scriptaculous to jQuery and the only change I had to make was to use

instead of in my JavaScript. In this way jQuery is not in conflict, as jam13 indicated. Validation code on custom forms and Security/login works fine.