Hi George, I now know what is causing the problem. For one of the main libraries that Demeter depends upon that, your computer has a version that is actually ahead of any of my computers. One of the things that library does is manage parameters, including type constraints. That means that it does early checking that, for example, a numerica parameter is being set to a numeric value. A recent version of that library changed its definition of what constitutes a number. Apparently, your initialization file (~/.horae/demeter.ini) has a value for the default of the lower bound of the normalization range of "15.". That value, with the trailing dot, is causing the problem. That is, I can replicate your problem by setting that parameter to that value. I know how to fix Demeter to do the right thing given the current state of that library and such a perfectly reasonable numeric value as "15." That fix will make it into the next release. The immediate work-around is to edit the file ~/.horae/demeter.ini and search for this section: [bkg] e0_fraction = 0.5 spl2 = 0 nor2 = -100 clamp2 = 24 e0 = derivative kwindow = hanning pre1 = -150 dk = 0 fnorm = true nor1 = 150 nnorm = 3 kw = 2 nclamp = 5 spl1 = 0.0 clamp1 = 0 rbkg = 1.0 flatten = true pre2 = -30 You will have a line like nor1 = 15. Edit that to read nor1 = 15 and try restarting Athena. If you get a similar error message, search through that section or elsewhere in the .ini file for numeric values that have a trailing dot. Thanks for finding and reporting this! B -- Bruce Ravel ------------------------------------ bravel@bnl.gov National Institute of Standards and Technology Synchrotron Science Group at NSLS --- Beamlines U7A, X24A, X23A2 Building 535A Upton NY, 11973 Homepage: http://xafs.org/BruceRavel Software: https://github.com/bruceravel