There are a number of variants of EMS, and 2.0 got confused in some cases when it saw EMS available from EMM386 where it couldn't allocate a fixed 64K swap area in the UMBs to use for EMS paging (in theory, EMS should be able to use 4 non-contiguous 16K frames to provide the EMS swap space, but the early version of the Watcom DOS Extender used by 2.0 wasn't very forgiving in my experience.) I had far fewer problems with 2.0's extended version using QEMM or Helix's memory manager rather than HIMEM/EMM386, both of which could be easily configured to convert freely between XMS and EMS allocation on the fly, and would move things around in the UMBs to make a contigous 64K block if at all possible.

So, Ed, are you saying that if you load nothing else but HIMEM/EMM386, then it should be able to allocate a contiguous 64K block of UMB? Or is that still not a given?

Bonnie