Dave, Problem partly solved. Using the command line at the foot of the XyWin window, I changed the current directory from the XyWin documents folder to the XW folder, and XyWin found the speller. The XWSTART.INT file created by the installer switched the directory to C:\XYDOCS (which I used instead of the suggested C:\DOCS). Does your file do the same thing? Can Xy find the speller if you CD to another folder at the Xy command line? Wait - even more interesting: If I CD to XW and use the speller, and then CD back to XyDocs, the speller continues to work. It seems that XyWin needs to find the speller only once. If it can't find it in its own folder, this may be a problem in otvdm which I can report. And to add to the complications, in my setup, XyWin can only find the thesaurus if the current directory is C:\XW. If you can experiment and report any discoveries, they may be useful if something needs to be reported to the otvdm developers. Edward