The GLIMMER system for microbial gene identification finds approximately 97-98% of all genes in a genome when compared with published annotation. This paper reports on two new results: (i) significant technical improvements to GLIMMER that improve its accuracy still further, and (ii) a comprehensive evaluation that demonstrates that the accuracy of the system is likely to be higher than previously recognized. A significant proportion of the genes missed by the system appear to be hypothetical proteins whose existence is only supported by the predictions of other programs. When the analysis is restricted to genes that have significant homology to genes in other organisms, GLIMMER misses <1% of known genes.