Bruce,
I got an interesting bug report a few days ago which I could only partly address. A fellow asked me:
I have installed the IFEFFIT package in my computer (WIN ME). The installation software seems to work ok. However, when I try to run the *.bat files, I have the following message, repeated twice: "out of environment space". Despite these messages athena, gifeffit and ifeffit are runnig ok. However, tkatoms.bat and apt.bat don't run at all.
I understand that the "out of environment space" problem results from the rather awkward way the old Windows operating systems handled "conventional" memory and the amount of memory dedicated to holding the values of environment variables. It seems reasonable that this message turns up when our .bat files are run since they add to the environment. I suppose that an environment that is already nearly full could be tipped by our .bat files.
I have similar problems on a Win98 box. I eventually got tkatoms.bat to run by hacking away at the PATH setting inside tkatoms.bat. I never got apt.bat to run.