The password should not be placed on the first line of the file. When you do a STORE operation without specifying a new password, LISTSERV adds a PW= key- word at the BOTTOM of the header. When LSVSORT is called, it cannot know what kind of operation was performed, nor can it know whether the PW= keyword on line 1 was the one provided in the STORE command or whether the list was pass- wordless and it was intended as a new password for the list. So it deletes it. In V1.3e (don't think I distributed it to anybody) I had a restriction that the list title *must* be the first non-blank comment line of the list, which exclu- des placing the password on the first line. I removed this requirement later when I completely rewrote LSVKEYWD, but still I don't like the idea of keywords before list title (by the way, this causes a new restriction to list titles: they cannot contain any "=" sign. You can't both have the cake and eat it). As for V1.4, as I told you I'm off the net for quite a long time, and hope to be able to come back on weekends *when* my passcard for this trimester is ready (even the school director cannot come on weekends without a passcard :-) He knows it and he DOES sign one for himself regularly ;-) ). Since it's not ready today, I doubt I'll be there at all this weekend :-( :-( Eric