Today I wanted to get R help to start up in text mode under Windows XP. I had my own notes on how to do that. The method described there didn't work. I checked on R-help. No helpful messages on the subject. Therefore I post here in the hope that it helps someone else (or myself, when I forget and search Rhelp again in future). The short story is that R seems to have changed recently (and maybe updates to Windows XP affected file naming). - as before, .Rprofile is placed in home directory, which is shown by doing: Sys.getenv("R_USER") - newer versions of Windows XP don't like to use filenames (eg .Rprofile) with a dot as first character! Have to rename file via start>Run>cmd - Need to put following line in .Rprofile: options(help_type="text") Old instructions to put options(chmhelp ="FALSE") in .Rprofile do NOT work. Cheers, Bill