Okay, maybe I'm a little sadistic and I made stupid cut-and-paste, but I did get my Windows XP system to put up the following message: "C251 Compiler has encountered a problem and needs to close. We are sorry for the inconvenience. If you were in the middle of something, the information you were working on might be lost." I had absent-mindedly put some code above a local variable declaration (something I do on purpose in Visual C++ all the time) and the C251 compiler choked. Hard! The LST file was truncated, but did contain the error messages so it was easy to fix and I didn't lose any anything. For whatever it's worth. Joel