There have been serious delays in the BITNET core while the UIUCVM42 and UICVM regions were consolidated into a single region, known as UICBIT. This turned out to be too much traffic after all, so the regions were split again into UICBIT and UICBIT2, yesterday afternoon I think. Things seem to be settling down now and hopefully the queues will clear over the weekend and the problem will be gone. I should perhaps clarify that, while I am aware of all this because I also run a core site and am on the corresponding lists, I am not involved in the management of the US core, and I am not a spokesman for the people who do manage the core. I'm just answering your question :-) Eric