Rogan: Thanks very much. I began by downloading the latest gtk+ bundle from http://www.gtk.org/download-windows.html The instructions there said to just copy the files to any dir and add its ...\gtk\bin dir to my PATH, which I did, so that worked okay without admin privs. Given that I need to use these tools on a network drive (H:), and not C:, I have installed the Platform and gtk to: H:\proc\tools\Haskell Platform and H:\proc\tools\gtk (My H: is a hdd, not usb; and I am trying to do all this without admin privs, which is working fine so far.) The gtk tests: pkg-config --cflags gtk+-2.0 and gtk-demo run fine. Great! **** Anyone: **** So, I am trying to use cabal (for the first time), on a Windows XP system/network. I need to keep everything on H:, and not use C:. The only copy of cabal I have is what came with the Platform: "H:\proc\tools\Haskell Platform\2010.1.0.0\lib\extralibs\bin\cabal.exe". I placed that bin dir in my PATH and tried a "cabal update". (Does is matter what my current dir is, when I use cabal?) It said: H:\proc\dev\cmd>cabal update Config file path source is default config file. Config file C:\Documents and Settings\pschmitz\Application Data\cabal\config not found. Writing default configuration to C:\Documents and Settings\pschmitz\Application Data\cabal\config Downloading the latest package list from hackage.haskell.org Note: there is a new version of cabal-install available. To upgrade, run: cabal install cabal-install So, by default, cabal wants to put its config and updates on C:. I looked at C:\Documents and Settings\pschmitz\Application Data\cabal\config It has various references to C:, some commented out. E.g.: remote-repo-cache: C:\Documents and Settings\pschmitz\Application Data\cabal\packages build-summary: C:\Documents and Settings\pschmitz\Application Data\cabal\logs\build.log install-dirs user -- prefix: "C:\\Documents and Settings\\pschmitz\\Application Data\\cabal" etc. I also reviewed the Cabal User's Guide, including section 4.1.2.2 Paths in the simple build system which has a table with command line switches and pathname defaults for Windows including: --prefix (global installs with the --global flag) C:\ProgramFiles\Haskell and --prefix (per-user installs with the --user flag) C:\DocumentsAndSettings\user\ApplicationData\cabal Given that I want to keep everything on H:, and assuming that I don't want to place the Cabal configs and updates in the Platform tree (H:\proc\tools\Haskell Platform), I would _like_ to create a dir such as H:\proc\tools\cabal to hold everything that Cabal would normally put on C:. *** I'm afraid I'm having trouble figuring out how to accomplish this. Is there (hopefully) a combination of cabal command line switches that will create a new config file over on H: for me, or must I edit the config file directly and move it to H:? And then, how do I invoke cabal each time, to get it to use its tree on H: (and ignore C:) ? Thanks (very much) in advance. -- Peter Schmitz