Hello Tank and greetings from a fellow Greek! Allin and all, recently (about two weeks ago) I have had the following experience with one of my graduate students: I helped him install the latest Windows gretl release on his brand new Toshiba laptop, only to find out that no Excel files could be opened on his machine! We tried different things, including moving Excel files to pretty clean directory names (e.g. C:\here) to no avail. I was totally baffled and could not explain what caused this behavior; my student eventually gave up on gretl. THEN I realized his laptop came preinstalled with a *GREEK* edition of Windows XP (SP2). Is yours too Tank (i.e. do menus and dialog boxes etc all appear in GREEK)? If YES you may want to try installing gretl and REPEATING the exact procedure on a machine equipped with plain vanilla *English *Windows. My bet is that things will run smoothly. If so, could you kindly report back to the group so Allin may look into it? If my suspicion is confirmed, I will feel justified in advising friends, colleagues and students to steer clear of Greek installations of Windows. BTW a very happy new year to Allin and all esteemed members of this group. Tank, feel free to contact me privately should I be able to be of any assistance. John "Yannis" Paravantis Lecturer, Department of Digital Systems University of Piraeus +30 210 4142771 office +30 210 697 3048824 cell.