hello whoever you are, i think you need to know that on my system at least, things do not work correctly, if you look at the file i have copied below you will see that when i added a menu item for a program i installed called DAP the refernece was added properly to the end of ~/.menu/adding_by_menudrake but it also reinserted the original version of a line i had to edit by hand because the two progs kmenuedit and menudrake refused to do it for me: namely the reference to kpackage which i like to run as root since it's pretty useless otherwise to me. snip: ?package(menu): needs="gnome" icon="default_section.xpm" section="Configuration/" title="Gnome" charset="ISO-8859-1" ?package(menu): needs="gnome" icon="default_section.xpm" section="Configuration/Gnome/" title="Desktop" charset="ISO-8859-1" ?package(menu): needs="gnome" icon="default_section.xpm" section="Configuration/Gnome/" title="Multimedia" charset="ISO-8859-1" ?package(menu): needs="gnome" icon="default_section.xpm" section="Configuration/Gnome/" title="Peripherals" charset="ISO-8859-1" ?package(menu): needs="gnome" icon="default_section.xpm" section="Configuration/Gnome/" title="User Interface" charset="ISO-8859-1" ?package(kdeadmin): needs="x11" icon="kpackage.png" section="Configuration/Packaging/" title="Package Manager" longtitle="kpackage RPM and DEB manager" command="kdesu kpackage %u" charset="ISO-8859-1" kde_filename="kpackage" kde_mimetype="application/x-rpm;application/x-debian-package;" kde_opt="\\nDocPath=kpackage/index.html \\nTerminal=0\\nTerminalOptions=\\nPath=\\nMapNotify=true\\nInitialPreference=5" kde_command="kpackage -caption \"%c\" %i %m %u" ?package(kdeadmin): needs="x11" icon="kpackage.png" section="Configuration/Packaging/" title="Package Manager" longtitle="kpackage RPM and DEB manager" command="kdesu kpackage %u" charset="ISO-8859-1" kde_filename="kpackage" kde_mimetype="application/x-rpm;application/x-debian-package;" kde_opt="\\nDocPath=kpackage/index.html \\nTerminal=0\\nTerminalOptions=\\nPath=\\nMapNotify=true\\nInitialPreference=5" kde_command="kdesu kpackage -caption \"%c\" %i %m %u" ?package(menu): needs="x11" icon="kcmsound.png" section="Multimedia/Sound/" title="DAP" longtitle="DAP - Digital Audio Processor" command="DAP" charset="ISO-8859-1" :snip this reinserted line undoes my own changes, leading me to create my own file 'adding_by_bascule' to keep track of changes i make that i have to reapply everytime i change the menu in any way ! :-) it occurs to me that this may be because it was not envisaged that folk would want to edit the menu items provided by mandrake but even so, why make it difficult to do if that's what is desired? now i know how to deal with this so this is just so you can look forward to lm8.1 :-) bascule