Excuse me, maven, but in your first post you said he had put in a bid five days earlier. Now you are saying he hadn't bid before. You're right, a person who doesn't bid at all can't win...and won't show up in the bid history. But a person who shows up only once, five days prior to your bid, can indeed come back to haunt you with a higher proxy than your bid, if that one and only bid had a maximum that topped yours five days later. It just wouldn't show up as being higher than yours until your bid pushed his bid higher. That's what proxies are supposed to do.