Thanks for your input guys.

I am prepared to play by the rules and if 64 characters is it, then so be it.

I'm not short of strategies to stay within the limit ... that wasn't the question. I was simply bewildered by the sudden appearance of a message box telling me that what I had been doing for a year or two was not allowed, together with the implication that it never had been. I am sorry that no light could be shed on that.

I understand that long file names bring compatibilty problems with legacy software that can't directly support them. We are all familiar with the tilde ~. I don't agree that they are a bad idea. I come from the days of Commodore BASIC (PET) when variable names were limited to two characters ... now that WAS as bad idea!

Being well behaved I installed MCS+ in the default folder which results in a big long path to my .pbp files. I'm a bit miffed that doing the right thing now limits me to something akin to the straight jacket of the 8.3 file naming convention.

Thanks again for your interest.

Brian Walsh.