Been a while since I've messed with applescript, but have tons of them laying around that are used almost every day. I ran into a problem with one that is basically a data mining script that had not been used in a while. It is a drop script that opens a print file from an ancient accounting system and parses the file extracting out some data and puts it into a tab delimited import file. (using read/write in standard additions) The original drop application was classic, but now running on Intel. Compiled and saved it with no problem. When we tried to import the file (to filemaker pro) we started to see some strange stuff. Come to find out that on the system of the person I wrote the script for, every character that it writes out is proceeded by a Null character. Opening in text wrangler and showing invisibles shows all the nulls. This was on a MacBook Pro running Tiger. On my machine (intel iMac running Leopard) it works fine - no null characters. Most of the data extracted is using some form of "Set foo to characters 4 thru 12 of bar as string". Text item delimiters set to "". Almost seems some setting on his machine in making at act like UTS-16. Text Wrangler/BBedit reports it as US Roman/Mac. Any ideas? Did not check archives since I can't seem to find them. Steve Alex AIDT