READING e-mail at 3am, playing online games for hours on end and relentlessly downloading pop or pornography from the internet have turned the home computer into the most dangerous threat to marriage to have emerged over the past 30 years, US lawyers claim.

The American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, which represents 1,600 divorce specialists, is to publish a booklet of marital advice that will include a stark warning that the humble PC is a potential home-wrecker.

Two-thirds of the academy??s lawyers said the PC had played a significant role in ??alienating the affections?? of one or both spouses in some of their cases.

While traditional causes of friction, from money worries to breakdowns in communication, retain their importance as factors in America??s 50% divorce rate, the home computer has made it easier to find new romance.

The survey showed that in the cases affected by the computer, 68% of unfaithful spouses had met their lover over the internet.

Sandra Morris, a San Diego divorce lawyer, said 10% of her clients were men who walked out on their wives and children only when they had established another relationship. ??These are shy people who may never have met another person before the invention of the internet chat room,?? said Morris.

??In the past they may not have been perfectly happy, but they would have stayed married and maybe worked out their problems. The computer is the fastest-growing threat to marriage I have seen in 34 years as a divorce lawyer.??

Pornography, which helped drive the development of ever-faster personal computers during the 1990s, is another element. Some 56% of aggrieved spouses claim an ??obsessive interest in pornographic sites?? ruined their relationships.

The guilty parties are not always men. Richard Barry, a divorce lawyer near San Francisco and president of the academy, said he had recently dealt with an emotionally wounded husband who discovered that his wife was hiding files of explicit photographs on his computer.

Most men are caught out when website subscriptions disguised as suspiciously bland memberships appear on their credit card bills.

But pornography is far from being the only problem of its kind. A recent report on Kazaa, an online music service, said 10m of its users spent more than 30 hours a week downloading pop tunes.

Computer games such as Sony??s EverQuest, in which up to 400,000 people pretending to be elves and wizards fight each other simultaneously, can last all night. More than 1m Britons, mostly men in their twenties and thirties, play such games at weekends.

Barry said the computer had become a new refuge from family stresses. ??But both men and women can get up to a lot of mischief online, such as tracking down lost high-school loves and rekindling romances that may seem a lot more exciting than the lives they live today.??

While celebrities such as David Bowie, Sandra Bullock and Leonardo DiCaprio have admitted to day-long internet binges, Barry said such usage should be negotiated between couples before it gets out of hand. ??Like all technologies ?? like TV and the car ?? it can be both a blessing and a curse,?? he said. ??The trick is to get off the computer and see if anybody is still at home.??

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