Sorry, all, for causing so much unrelated traffic on the list. Our servers were down for a few days so I couldn't respond. It is indeed the character set that's the problem. I was using the Japanese one as my default setting in pine because I write a lot of messages in Japanese. I've reset it to: iso-8859-1 Those who were having trouble should not have it any more. The battery is now working fine. And no, the machine remains names Hell -- it's not as bad as it sounds, since Hell in German means "bright, clear", so I can pretend it's good or bad depending on my mood. Thanks for all the help. Cheers, -- Dr. Shravan Vasishth Phone: +49 (681) 302 4504 Computational Linguistics, Universität des Saarlandes, Postfach 15 11 50 D-66041 Saarbrücken, Germany http://www.coli.uni-sb.de/~vasishth