Thanks a lot to all working on this. This is just a small experience report. I successfully installed the HP on a borrowed windows XP professional, version 5.1.2600. It was very smooth. It felt like a largeish install; I was glad I had a fast link. Afterward I had a GHC submenu in start menu -> all programs. (I renamed it Haskell since my girlfriend has at least heard me ramble on about that.) Opening a standard CMD prompt, I ghc-pkg and cabal worked just as usual - great. My first cabal install failed, telling me I needed to cabal update first. After that, cabal install worked just fine until I tried some regex libs: regex-posix failed with a bunch of errors, the first being could not find regex.h. I installed the latest stable cygwin with default options and tried again with: cabal install regex-posix --extra-include-dirs=/cygwin/usr/include --extra-lib-dirs=/cygwin/usr/lib. This worked fine. regex-pcre failed telling me I needed the pcre c library. The basic cygwin install didn't affect this. That's as far as I got. Best - Simon