At the beginning of August I reported a problem that I had encountered with use of the smpl and setobs commands inside functions. From the change log for Version 1.7.7 (items 4 & 5) I had understood that this problem had been corrected in the new version, but I have not had time to test it before now. Sadly, my test scripts still fail in the same way as before. To recap briefly. My function is designed to deal with unbalanced panel data, whereas Gretl's standard panel functions insist on balanced panel data. It proceeds as follows: (a) check that the data supplied is panel data, (b) extract the panel & time ids to new variables, (c) define the data as cross section and drop cases with missing values, (d) carry out the function estimation, (e) attempt to reset sample to the full data supplied (smpl full), (f) redefine the data as panel data using the panel & time ids extracted in step (b). This works as intended when it is supplied with my full test dataset. However, the program falls over in this final step, reporting that missing values were encountered, when the sample is restricted before the function is called. The reason is that the full data contains 91 panels containing up to 14 time periods in each panel with 1274 cases in total. Before executing the function I have dropped all panels with panel_id > 9 (smpl id < 10 --restrict). However, after the "smpl full" command in the function is run the dataset has reverted to 1274 cases instead of the 126 cases supplied - the first 126 cases correspond to the original cases but cases 127 onwards consist entirely of missing values because the function does not know about them. I may be able to deal with this by dropping cases with missing values for the panel & time ids, but I understand that "smpl full" should not work in this way. I can provide my test programs and data but I have had problems in uploading Zip archives in the past so I would prefer to send them direct to someone's e-mail address rather than to the mailing list. Gordon