There should be nothing in grep that causes emuProxy to disappear, but I can't offer an explanation as to why this is happening.

Try this to see if mfs_ftp disappears:

ps ax
ps ax | grep mfs_ftp
ps ax

On a side note, apart from the anecdotal evidence of a proxy due to the change of ISP's have any tests been done to confirm a proxy? It would be very rare for an ISP to proxy port 8000.

Peter.