Jim, for your implementation you might want to have a look at the Macintosh-specific code in import.c (and possibly at related code in Mac/macglue.c, but that's probably less relevant). MacPython can already have files on sys.path, and there's code to look through these files for PYC resources. Don't worry what they are or how it's done, but they contain compiled modules. I got a pretty significant increase of import speed is when I added a cache of which sys.path entries were files and which were directories, so for each sys.path entry you know that you can skip one leg of the find_module() code. This is all in import.c, so you could probably enable it verbatim for zipfile imports. -- Jack Jansen | ++++ stop the execution of Mumia Abu-Jamal ++++ Jack.Jansen@oratrix.com | ++++ if you agree copy these lines to your sig ++++ www.cwi.nl/~jack | ++++ see http://www.xs4all.nl/~tank/ ++++