in MAss a teacher was found guolty under the mass law that says that it is illegal to have anything that depicts children engaged in sex... this guy had taken hard core porn and cut the faces of children out of store sunday fliers... and pasted them on the hard ore porn... in his head kids were having sex...

now the reason kiddie porn is illegal to possess ( where other "obscene material" is illegal to sell and mail, but fully legal to posess in your own home) is that the gov't wants to do everything it can to deter kids from becoming sex objects... kill the mnarket and no kids get molested...

so to answer a question like a lawyer, it all depends on what your state';s laws are re: what is kiddie porn and what is illegal to access....

my personal advice... is to get the pics out of youre harddrive... IF you are thought to have this stuff, the feds will take your hard drive and read even the things that you simply placed in teh recycle bin... i.e. you deleted the name from the directory, but you did not necessarily write over the data with the gifs/jpegs.
reformat to be fully safe... or do not down load it