Marcus and everyone: Based on two runs now, the new Hurd package doesn't seem to do that progressively-slower until it grinds to a halt thing anymore. I'll test more over the weekend as I try to push more packages through. binutils triggered the fork failure again. libtime-hires-perl compiles fine but goes into never-never land on the second test. I don't speak perl, so if someone else could tackle this... More later... =) Tks, Jeff Bailey