Thank you Regedit2 for your help. I kept changing things and went to work on some other programming stuff on other computers and came back and I must have changed the right thing and it started working. It still wouldn't work in the dos prompt mode which I can not understand if one works and the other doesn't so I un checked the legacy option in the dos prompt options area, restarted, and then the program runs as it should in dos prompt. I thought I'd pass this along since you gave me so much good help. I uninstalled an old roxio music recording program I had installed over the weekend but it did nothing. I went and checked the path cmd and the roxio paths where still there so I deleted them and reestablished the path to my programming that I had checked previously. I think this is what did it. Path can be accessed by going to settings, apps and features and then entering "path" into the search box at upper right. Then choose environmental variables and then highlight path and make sure you have a path established directly to where your programming is housed, ie c:\directory\filename.exe I'm sure you probably know this but I list it here in case someone like me is at wits end trying to find something to try. hit ok when you're finished editing the path command. Remember to preface your path cmd with a ; So a path cmd stuck on to the end of existing paths would be ;c:\directory where .exe file exists\filename.exe Hope this helps someone else. RB