I had that problem too.. it was driving me CRAZY, since I use autocheck and autoreplace a lot. After thinking it through, the answer seemed clear enough: XyWrite looks for dictionaries in its home directory. By including the home directory (C:\XY4 for DOS, C:\XW for Windows) in the AUTOEXEC.BAT file, the problem went away. So I changed the AUTOEXEC.BAT file to have those directories.