All, I thought, as a public service, that I would publish some problems that I have had patching systems recently. My therapist recommends that I not go into the gory details as I may suffer a relapse and end up in an institution. 1. Even though it seems that adding Power Patch 7 and a 100bt Subsys tape at the same time is legal, it does not always work. If the version of 100bt is version "A" and not version "B" the software will not install correctly. From my experience, any "off-hours" engineer 1)will not know about this problem and 2)If you are using Patch/iX they will not be able to help you at all. The first time I called the answer to my problem was, "Let's start over with Autoinst". My reply was, "Isn't Patch/iX a supported tool?" I found that the engineers that work 8-5 M-F know about it and are able to help. It seems to me that the off-hours engineers should be as well if not more versed in patching because that is when most patching is done. 2. Because of the extended life of 5.5, adding Power Patch 7 could push the start image past the 16mb limit making it unusable. The answer to this problem is to install from an early version of 5.5 and install Power Patch 7 on top of it. HP is working on a way to increase the max size of the start image. I had an idea about a new patch manual while going through all of this. I would like to know what other people think of it. I think that it would be useful if the ESC had a utility that could download a manual that was customized to whatever patch process a person was going to do. You could tell it that you were going to install a power patch with reactive patches using Patch/iX. The ESC could then create a package that would have just the information that was needed. No more skipping from section to section and HP would not have to print the manuals. I feel like the poster child for not patching systems and I wanted everyone to benefit from my experience. Scott Lindholm Sr Systems Administrator Corporate Express 303-664-3264 [log in to unmask]