I wrote too soon. The Info-zip based zip.exe seems to crash on a dir that winzip does fine on and compresses to 3.5GB. It stops with an undescriptive error midway through a certain file, yet using it to zip a lower folder including that file works. I suspect it hits some internal size or number limit (the dir has 48k files and >4GB). It also passes over hidden dirs (even when told to include) and any (at least top level) dir that has '.' in it, such as \temp.now . -Skip -- http://www.piclist.com PIC/SX FAQ & list archive View/change your membership options at http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/piclist