Hi Alex and all. 1. I have successfully got vmware to work on a Windows xp system. I don't remember adding serial ports, they were they by default . I didn't have any problems using debian sarge with speakup built into the kernal. The othe rquestion in regards to what sscreen readers that work on a VMWare environment is all linux screen readers. VM stands for virtual machine. Any os will work in this environment. So you could run windows XP in a VM machine and the host computer could be linux or windows 2k. A host is the original os that you booted up on. Sorry that I could be any help with your problem. I would suggest that you kill the vm file and start again. Sean
