Mingliang, It's not exactly how I would have liked the answers, but the screenshots of the steps you performed does actually (at least implicitly) answer to some of the questions: 1) how are you starting Athena and Sixpack? You never actually said this, before, bbut you are using runner.exe. Good. Now we know that the enviromental variables are set correctly. 2) what happens when you click on grwnd.exe? You did not answer, but grwnd.exe does run. 3) Sixpack does launch, and the file browser works up to being able to import files. 4) Athena seems to crash because a Grwnd Plot panel cannot be initialized, even though the Grwnd frame is running. I have seen problems similar to each of these, on different computers. I think they are not related to one another. For your Sixpack problem, like Richard, I also get the same message, but the "Generic File Read" comes up anyway. Question: Do you see the "Generic File Read" come up? Furthermore, if I rename the file from Se(0)-reference\X150013.1d.txt to Se\X1500013.1d.txt The file is read fine. I suspect the '-' sign and parentheses in the folder name are the problem. Given your screenshots, I might also suspect there could be non-ASCII characters in some of the folder names. Ifeffit cannot deal with non-ASCII characters in file names or file content. Non-ASCII characters in the data files would be a more serious problem, but these data (converted from EPICS MDA files) are fine for that. But the path name could cause problems too. You may try moving to something as simple as C:\SE\X150013.dat Question: Does the file read ok if you change the path name? For Athena, you see it crash, but it does launch grwnd.exe. It does not put a plot panel into grwnd.exe, so Athena cannot plot and crashes. First, try this: From the running grwnd.exe select "File->Open", browse to C:\Program Files\IFeffit\share\athena_testpattern.gwd, and open this file. Question: Does a plot appear? If so, leave that grwnd.exe running, and relauch Athena. Question: Does Athena now run? Please try all of these steps and tell us IN WORDS what happens. --Matt