Dear All, The VB6 field service engineer has found and fixed the root cause of the write problem, and Bill has turned it green in Coral. Both the shape-writer input and output boards were replaced, and the system has now successfully written a ring-oscillator pattern without the extraneous 'slivers' that were being seen before. The 5na databases have been created and are ready to go. Bill is working on other databases, so if you need a database that is not 5na please see Bill to get that installed and/or determine when the other databases will be available. Thanks to Raith/Vistec for their continued service support, and thanks especially to the Birck user community for your patience. Ron