The bdist command in the CVS version is broken under windows. Two problems: 1. It seems the needed directories are not created: . . . self.bdist_dir = build\bdist.win32\dumb self.format = zip changing into 'build\bdist.win32\dumb' error: build\bdist.win32\dumb: No such file or directory 2. This error occurrs only after hacking around the second problem: change_root(), which is not implemented for nt. Having said this, I cannot really understand the purpose of change_root. Finally I tried distutils under Linux, and it seems that change_root converts relative into (nearly) absolute pathnames: usr/lib/python1.5/site-packages/distutils/... This MAY make sense under unix, where python is always(?) installed in the same path, but not under windows! Thomas Heller