I got it to work. It is stupid beyond belief. Here's how. I simply deleted all the comments from the _supplied_ autoexec.nt and config.nt files. That's it. So it works until I try something else dumb. I also included a subst command in a batch file that I thought would only work once, but it seems to work all the time. One of these 'help the user' things -- it's like the 'wizards' in Word, etc. have now invaded the most basic OS tasks. That's worriesome indeed ! Now if only I could get thectrl and caps-lock keys switched!