Some years ago, when we migrated our first series 70 to MPE/XL, I got such an error while reading a variable record file. The system crashed but I do not remember what the abort number was. The error occurred while testing an in-house developed routine that would download soft fonts. The routine opens up the font file in "MR;NOBUF" mode but it needed to read a few bytes from the first record of the file in order to determine the orientation and validate that the file was indeed a soft font. The code would read about 40 bytes but due to the way the file was opened the file system error that corresponds to "BAD VARIABLE BLOCK STRUCTURE" would be returned. On the series 70 this could be ignored because it would still bring the requested bytes of the record, but it would crash the MPE/XL machine. I worked around the problem by determining the type of CPU and when I was dealing with an MPE/XL cpu I would open up the file a second time with out the "MR;NOBUF" option and read the first record. So is it possible that something other than a system process is opening and closing those spoolfiles?. Could you have some in-house or third party utility that opens a spoolfile without allocating a large enough buffer to hold the spoolfile block? Regards Paul Christidis ______________________________ Reply Separator _________________________________ Subject: Background Jobs and SA615 Author: Charles Leader <[log in to unmask]> at CCGATE Date: 1/26/1996 8:56 AM Has anyone gotten a large number of BAD VARIABLE BLOCK STRUCTURE on spoolfiles followed by System Abort 615's on their systems? We have been getting this error on a quite a few spoolfiles while they are open and a few SA615s when the system attempts to close these spoolfiles. HPRC said this is fixed in a patch (MPEHXT7) on 5.0, but we just started getting these errors about 2 1/2 months ago. Anyone else traveled this road already? Thanks in advance, Charles Leader ST. Lukes Regional Medical Center Boise, Id.