I noticed recently that on my Linux install of 1.7.0 some of the recommended packages got updated (through update.packages()) but on my Win2000 machine they did not. After some of them got updated for the second time on the Linux box I become curious. I went to the US CRAN mirror and checked the 1.7 folder under contributed packages for Windows systems and most of the recommended packages are not there at all! I did not check every one of them, but the missing ones are at least the ones that got updated on my Linux machine. They are class, cluster, nlme, MASS/VR and spatial. Surprisingly, the foreign package is there, but its version is 0.5-12 and the newest one is 0.5-13. Is there a different method of updating recommended packages now? Thanks in advance, Andy PS. Additional info: (1) I am using the US CRAN mirror (Wisconsin machine), but it looks like there is the same problem with the main CRAN site. (2) On my Linux box the update.packages() works from sources, but on the Windows box it wants precompiled packages (zip files) unless. I just updated nlme from nlme.tar.gz "by hand" but can this be automated using update.packages() functionality. __________________________________ Andy Jaworski Engineering Systems Technology Center 3M Center, 518-1-01 St. Paul, MN 55144-1000 ----- E-mail: apjaworski at mmm.com Tel: (651) 733-6092 Fax: (651) 736-3122