Another cheater plug thread

Elizabeth, Plane crashing or bus driving into your home does not depend on you and is therefore not worth discussing. Driving without seat-belts or good brakes is dangerous no matter how small chance of accident is. Similarly, leaving one metal cabinet (that was designed to be grounded) floating while next one is grounded is dangerous. Being irresponsible with proper grounding is not very smart, IMHO, but recommending it to others is much worse.

I would think that some return to ground is necessary otherwise system noise would travel from box to box. For instance noise induced in the shield has to find return to ground and it is far better to find direct path instead of currents traveling on ground wire of IC (causing voltage drops that appear as signal) to another box that is "closer" to ground even if everything is floating. Floating might also be a disaster in case of static discharge to connector ground since current will go thru all available paths (including signal path electronics) to find return, instead of quick return to local ground. I would use high voltage capacitor about 0.01uF/1kV possibly with 100k-1M resistor in parallel between signal and chassis ground possibly close to input connectors. Hard wired connection (like in IBM PC) is good when we have only one box but otherwise makes ground loops or cause large current between boxes plugged into different outlets when connected together.

Newbee, Interconnects make connections between signal grounds that most likely aren't chassis grounds.