A recurring theme is that I encounter a problem for which there is no explanation from the system, hack the vm sources to add some tracing, and correct the problem. As a result, I end up building the vm from source and so tend to use a shell script that runs it. FWIW, without a -plugins option, this is what happens with the current sources: Load failed for: /usr/local/lib/squeak/4.0.3-2202//so.vm-sound-OSS Load failed for: /usr/local/lib/squeak/4.0.3-2202//so.vm-sound-MacOSX Load failed for: /usr/local/lib/squeak/4.0.3-2202//so.vm-sound-Sun Load failed for: /usr/local/lib/squeak/4.0.3-2202//so.vm-sound-pulse Load failed for: /usr/local/lib/squeak/4.0.3-2202//so.vm-sound-ALSA Load failed for: /usr/local/lib/squeak/4.0.3-2202//so.MiscPrimitivePlugin Load failed for: /usr/local/lib/squeak/4.0.3-2202//so.FilePlugin Load failed for: /usr/local/lib/squeak/4.0.3-2202//so.SecurityPlugin Load failed for: /usr/local/lib/squeak/4.0.3-2202//so.LargeIntegers Load failed for: /usr/local/lib/squeak/4.0.3-2202//so.BitBltPlugin Load failed for: /usr/local/lib/squeak/4.0.3-2202//so.B2DPlugin Load failed for: /usr/local/lib/squeak/4.0.3-2202//so.LocalePlugin Load failed for: /usr/local/lib/squeak/4.0.3-2202//so.SocketPlugin Load failed for: /usr/local/lib/squeak/4.0.3-2202//so.FloatArrayPlugin Load failed for: /usr/local/lib/squeak/4.0.3-2202//so.Matrix2x3Plugin Note the extra / in the paths. Some of the plugins should fail to load; the point is that *all* of them fail to load. Bill