I've been unable to follow the whole list lately, but I caught some mention of what might be a more toward platform-dependence, or lack of independence. I *like* being able to work on Linux and deploy to Windows. Hopefully we won't lose that. I agree that things should happen in the image far more than in the vm - easier to see and fix. The Smalltalk debugger is great, so we should use it at every opportunity; putting things in the image is enabling. Dolphin shows us the correct path: session awareness. The image "wakes up" and decides where it is running - the vm can certainly help in Pharo's case. External resources are *not* cleared on image save - the image might keep running, so why release and reallocate? Finalization is best-effort. External resources are cleared just before exiting, but *after* any associated image save. When the image wakes, one of its first duties is to clear (not release via calls) any external resources, because they are known to be garbage at this point. It works, and works well. Bill