| No, I haven't used the FE formatter; all I've tried (with very little
| success) was the "customer formatter."  I was so disgusted with the
| "customer formatter" that I kept a VS2000 around whose only purpose
| is to reformat MFM disks.

The customer thing is utter crap.  I suspect at best it can reformat a
properly formatted disk.  Otherwise forget it.  It produces no useful
commentary (I think just "N minutes into the format") although I have
noted that one must have a fairly up-to-date set of EPROMs on the RQDX3
to get a proper dialog even with the FE version of the uVAXen diagnostics.
I know that 339E5 & 340E5 are new enough; related to that I think these
and maybe two revs before (will work also, mid to high 200's) are needed
for RD54s to work right.

The FE diagnostics also allow you to do continuous testing on any/all
devices found.  We found that the RX50 version is also way better than
the TK50 version - why?  You'll get grey hair waiting for the TK50 to
load while the floppy version takes two to boot, and specific device
diags are on the 8 other diskettes (you get to remember which is which
and when in a rush just jump to the one you want and skip loading the
other diags).

| Would the FE package be available from DECdirect, maybe?  If it's cheap
| and available, it sounds like it may be a bit more portable than carrying
| around a VS2000 to format disks.

I would doubt it is cheap - but then I only borrow the set from our
hardware folks and they've had them since the start of this decade. 
I think we also don't get the spiffy web browser access being we're in
a strange and foreign land from the U.S.  8-)  Much like the 1-800 #'s.