the problem seemed to arise from the vdos installer somehow putting things in a xy3 folder, even though I run xy4 once kari helped me straighten that out, things fell into place...still unsure why that happened, but everything's fine now. another minor curiousity was that simply changing my startup.int program from 'ldkbd' to load allowed startup.int to load when xywrite ran, vs me having to do it manually. but manually, ldkbd worked fine. been using xywrite so long, since 1984 I think, I forget what little I know between computer changes.....my shift to windows 10 came after a decade or more of running xy under windows ME. I actually looked into buying a new dos computer, but they were pricey. tom horton