after a week, and roughly 10 hours, of downloading this, uzipping that, moving and copying files, and ending up corrupting my main program (oops!) i finally have a clean running program that lets me enter ascension peak. here's what i did: i ran the uninstall program and said "no to all" for deleting associated files. this saved my "saves" and "levels" files. then i reinstalled the full game starting with disk 1 and so on. i went to the wiz8 homepage and downloaded the 12_23 and .001 patches then double-clicked winzip and specified the folder as c:\program files\sirtech\wizardry8 for both files (one at a time) hope this helps anyone going through the torture i didas for the not!, Llevram is very wise