Thank you for your kind letter. I am not concerned with the performance of this package. I have decided it is part of the "make Linux more usable by non-computer people" endeavor. That is probably a good and noble cause and I have no complaint abou that. However, I have just gotten accustomed to the Synaptic Package Manager and it works much better than Software Center, so I think I will just stick with that. I gave Software Center a try because you never know whether something new is going to be any good or not unless you try it. Most new stuff gets a "bleh, useless", but occasionally you find something you like. I am curious as to how one designs a program that is so very, very slow, especially since it doesn't seem to be doing much of anything. Once upon a time I was talking to a mainframe application programmer and the first thing he put in every program was a loop that counted to a million or so. Then, after the program was completed and put to use and the users came back with their inevitable complaint that it was too slow, he could go away and "work on it" for a week, spend a couple of minutes cutting the delay loop down and deliver a massive performance improvement and the user's were overjoyed. I kind of doubt whether such a simplistic scheme has been employed here, but I do wonder just what is going on. I suspect object oriented programming has run amuck and processes and possibly even complete virtual workspaces are being invoked willy-nilly without regard to consequences. An analysis of what this program is doing might be instructive for many programmers. Cheers, Charles Pergiel Silicon Forest www.pergelator.blogspot.com On Wed, Oct 19, 2011 at 9:22 AM, Gary Lasker