Hi there I'm sure that the solution to my problem will be easy but can you help. The following is a copy of my dos window having tried all of the ways to get mysqld to start running in the background. What am I doing wrong. I am using windows ME. Could this be the problem? Bad command or file name C:\WINDOWS>cd c:\mysql\bin C:\mysql\bin>mysqld --standalone Bad command or file name C:\mysql\bin>mysqld --debug Bad command or file name C:\mysql\bin> --debug Bad command or file name C:\mysql\bin> C:\mysql\bin> C:\mysql\bin>C:\mysql\bin\mysqladmin -u root shutdown C:\MYSQL\BIN\MYSQLA~1.EXE: connect to server at 'localhost' failed error: 'Can't connect to MySQL server on 'localhost' (10061)' Check that mysqld is running on localhost and that the port is 3306. You can check this by doing 'telnet localhost 3306' C:\mysql\bin>telnet localhost 3306 No local host found!! Thanking you in anticipation Kevin