Thanks Steve. I had not signed on to this list until after my problems started. When I searched the archives, I was searching on words like 'abend' and 'LSVBITFD' and didn't catch Nathan Brindle's post about a 'distribution problem'. I finally found it while searching with some other words, tried it out, and LISTSERV has been humming about 15 minutes. If it stays up I'll reload my SPTAPE'd backlog. thanks, kate riggsby