I have no idea what Andrei is reporting (speculation about whatever non-unicode means), but I can confirm Greg's helpful report. I have a Windows 7 64-bit machine that does have MinGW installed With C:\MinGW\bin in the PATH before C:\strawberry\perl\bin, etc, dartemis shows a splash screen and nothing else. With C:\MinGW\bin in the PATH after C:\strawberry\perl\bin, dartemis works fine. On the one hand, this is an easy enough fix to get Demeter working right now by changing the path as specified. But this is classic "DLL Hell" and changing the path around is a kludge that will continue to bite people. So, changing PATH is a simple solution, but it is not the right solution. Dartemis.bat (and so on) should set the path so that this cannot happen. I don't know how C:\strawberry\perl\site\lib\auto\Ifeffit\Ifeffit.dll was built, but if it relies on dlls in C:\strawberry\bin (etc) the Demeter applications should make sure these are the ones it will find. --Matt -- --Matt Newville <newville at cars.uchicago.edu> 630-252-0431