We downloaded a standalone blast web server from NCBI website last year. It has been working fine until very recently. A few new datasets with long names were added into the directory where we have all the blastable datasets. After that, blastn works for some datasets and all other types of blast search don't work. If I remove these long-name datasets, everything would work. There are no strange characters in these names except a few have '+' sign in the name. The problem doesn't go away if I only remove the ones with '+' sign. These long-name datasets themselves work ok for blastn search. The problem is that their existence interfere with normal function of other datasets. If you know the cause of this problem. Please help, many thanks. Yu-yu ----------------------------------------------- Yu-yu Bai Bioinformatics Specialist Syngenta Biotechnology, Inc. 3054 Cornwallis Road Research Triangle Park, NC 27709 Phone: (919) 765-5102 Fax: (919) 541-8610 ------------------------------------------------------