Stevan, Bruce, this Athena crashing (when opening a file or importing data) sounds similar to some trouble I had some months ago. Bruce solved my problem (as usual...) with a solution that I still need to apply and that still works perfectly. Iin the terminal, I type: export LANG=en_US.UTF-8 before launching athena or artemis (from the same terminal). I cannot guarantee that it will sove your problem, and I didn't inspect your error messages carefully, so I might be miles away from the truth, but since like me you're from a non-US country with probably non-US langage environments, I thought it would be worth trying. Cheers denis -- Institut Néel - CNRS http://neel.cnrs.fr/spip.php?rubrique264 +33 476 881 045