So worried... should I be worried?

[salsabike]

Hope the below will make you feel a little safer. Sheldon Brown seems to think that "slick" doesn't affect traction at all.

http://sheldonbrown.com/tires.html

Tread for on-road use

Bicycle tires for on-road use have no need of any sort of tread features; in fact, the best road tires are perfectly smooth, with no tread at all!

Unfortunately, most people assume that a smooth tire will be slippery, so this type of tire is difficult to sell to unsophisticated cyclists. Most tire makers cater to this by putting a very fine pattern on their tires, mainly for cosmetic and marketing reasons. If you examine a section of asphault or concrete, you'll see that the texture of the road itself is much "knobbier" than the tread features of a good quality road tire. Since the tire is flexible, even a slick tire deforms as it comes into contact with the pavement, acquiring the shape of the pavement texture, only while incontact with the road.

People ask, "But don't slick tires get slippery on wet roads, or worse yet, wet metal features such as expansion joints, paint stripes, or railroad tracks?" The answer is, yes, they do. So do tires with tread. All tires are slippery in these conditions. Tread features make no improvement in this.

[Dianyla]

Hope the below will make you feel a little safer. Sheldon Brown seems to think that "slick" doesn't affect traction at all.

Thanks for posting this, salsabike! I am new to the skinny tires and have been pondering whether to swap out my 700x23 slicks for some "winter tires" for the rainy Pacific NW. I think I'll just leave them on, now.