Jeremy, I have noticed an oddity in the launch behavior of X11 pymol when built against the newer Xorg from MacPorts under Xquartz 2.5.0-beta2. If you install pymol from MacPorts and launch it by executing pymol on the terminal, the Pymol viewer window will appear almost immediately but there is very long delay before the upper Pymol tk interface window appears. This contrasts to launching the fink pymol package on the same machine with Xquartz installed. In the fink case, the initial startup of pymol shows a much smaller delay between the appearance of the Pymol viewer window and the Pymol Tk interface window. Since both are running under Xquartz, I assume the difference in launch time is due to the X11 libraries in use. For fink pymol this is... [Macintosh-2:pymol-py26/modules/pymol] howarth% otool -L _cmd.so _cmd.so: /sw/lib/libfreeglut.3.dylib (compatibility version 12.0.0, current version 12.0.0) /usr/X11/lib/libGL.1.dylib (compatibility version 1.2.0, current version 1.2.0) /usr/X11/lib/libGLU.1.dylib (compatibility version 1.3.0, current version 1.3.0) /sw/lib/libpng12.0.dylib (compatibility version 36.0.0, current version 36.0.0) /usr/lib/libz.1.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 1.2.3) /usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 123.0.0) /usr/X11/lib/libX11.6.dylib (compatibility version 9.0.0, current version 9.0.0) /usr/X11/lib/libXext.6.dylib (compatibility version 11.0.0, current version 11.0.0) but for MacPorts pymol, this is... [Macintosh-2:pymol/modules/pymol] howarth% otool -L _cmd.so _cmd.so: /opt/local/lib/libglut.3.dylib (compatibility version 3.7.0, current version 3.7.0) /opt/local/lib/libGL.1.dylib (compatibility version 1.2.0, current version 1.2.0) /opt/local/lib/libGLU.1.dylib (compatibility version 1.3.0, current version 1.3.0) /opt/local/lib/libpng12.0.dylib (compatibility version 41.0.0, current version 41.0.0) /opt/local/lib/libz.1.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 1.2.3) /usr/lib/libSystem.B.dylib (compatibility version 1.0.0, current version 125.0.0) /opt/local/lib/libX11.6.dylib (compatibility version 10.0.0, current version 10.0.0) /opt/local/lib/libXext.6.dylib (compatibility version 11.0.0, current version 11.0.0) I'll see if I can eliminate this regression by building MacPorts pymol against a MacPorts freeglut package instead of stock libglut from Mesa used in MacPorts. Jack ps This slow launch has been seen before on linux... http://www.mail-archive.com/pymol-users@lists.sourceforge.net/msg05243.html. Note that this is a delay on first launch of pymol and not successive launches for that session.