I was not able to make an empty .i file work. Swig will complain about not finding a module. Theoretically, one could design a class that would throw an exception if you ever instantiated it if WXSCINTILLA wasn''t defined. In practice, I just added a rake task for generating optional components and added a directory called ''optional'' under swig/classes. I''m pretty pleased, although it does segfault when you exit the sample application. As I recall, this has something to do with virtual functions. There are no virtual functions functions, though I declared the destructor virtual as I thought I recalled a message about doing that to prevent the error. Roy