Finally I have got Excel to work on Mandriva. I believe there must be some beneficial change with wine version 0.9.13. Thanks! For over a year I have tried most versions but never got Excel to work on Mandriva. Excel started but exited after two seconds. I had no problem with other distros. (need Excel - not for .xls files where OO works fine, but for my old Lotus 123 .wk4 files) Krister Lytham UK