Folks; Have just verified that toggling SMP *on* is the critical switch to get the IBM java to go. This time the experiment used a single cpu G3 wallstreet with IBMJava2-SDK-1.3.1-0.0.ppc.rpm kernel 2.4.18-0.8a glibc-2.2.5-0.19a All other kernel options kept fixed. Any kernel gurus got an explanation? Cheers, James.