hello AM> as i understand this is the length of message as char.. AM> looks like it's not good to encode bytes as chars - it's a problem AM> with some charsets, representing it in hex or base64 can be much AM> more portable.. i've changed message length encoding/decoding functions to use 8-char hex value instead of that 3-byte binary value, and it fixed the problem - so i can now move from bare console to slime.. with best regards, Alex 'killer_storm' Mizrahi.