Due to problems with release 1.7b under CMS 7 and above all 8, and due to a large amount of internal changes making it very difficult to issue fixes at the moment, it looks like I cannot wait too long before releasing 1.7c. Due to conferences and other commitments I will be away most of next month, so we have to aim for a release date around the end of this month. Release 1.7c introduces support for CMS 8, fixes for CMS 6-8 and the SFS, and rather significant performance enhancements for backbone servers. In particular, updates to the "list of list" (GLOBLIST FILE) take from 8 to 10 times less CPU than previously, exclusive of any time spent updating the LISTS database if you host it (that part of the code is unchanged). For minor backbone servers, GLOBLIST FILE updates (X-LUPD jobs) could amount to 50% of the CPU bill, so this change considerably decreases the resource cost associated with joining the backbone. In addition, changes to the handling of DD's improve the performance of DISTRIBUTE by 10-30% in terms of CPU time, and may considerably reduce the amount of disk I/O involved in the distribution. A side effect is that LSVDIST2 EXEC no longer calls LSVCRC MODULE, which may or may not solve the REXX "Interpreter failure" problem for sites which have not installed the IBM fix. These changes, however, have introduced serious compatibility problems for locally written extensions or modifications, due to changes in data structures and conversion of a lot of central code to PASCAL. Due to the scope of the changes, I expect beta-testing to uncover a lot of problems, so do not apply unless you are prepared to do a fair amount of troubleshooting. I need a couple of sites running CMS 4-5, at least one VM/SP site, but I am mostly interested in CMS 7-8 sites. In addition, I need one site running the LISTS database, which I may well have broken and do not run locally (no way to test it myself). Thanks in advance for your cooperation. Note that I have set the 'Reply-To:' to point to me. Eric