Hi, I had some problems when trying to build boost-jam under WinXP SP2 with MSVC7.1. I searched the boost mailing list and found this message: "I have MS VC++ 7.1 installed to the default location (C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003), O/S WinXPSP2 However, when I run Build.bat from the command line, it returns " \Utilities\Bin\x86 was unexpected at this time." This occurs if I let the script auto-detect and also if I specify the toolset as vc7. Can someone please steer me in the right direction? regards Chris Ward" By debbuging the build.bat script, I could figure out what the problem is. It seems to be a problem with PATH environment variables that contains parenthesis '(' or ')'. This is the PATH I had when the problem occurred: "PATH=C:\Program Files\Microsoft DirectX 9.0 SDK (October 2005)\Utilities\Bin\x86;C:\WINDOWS\system32;C:\WINDOWS;C:\WINDOWS\System32\Wbem;C:\cygwin\bin;C:\Program Files\Common Files\GTK\2.0\bin;C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003\Vc7\bin" Just by removing "C:\Program Files\Microsoft DirectX 9.0 SDK (October 2005)", the build.bat script started working perfectly. This is caused because all the variables are expanded inline in a .bat file, so the parenthesis are understood as scope delimiters and messes up with the if () statements as in: if not "_%BOOST_JAM_TOOLSET_ROOT%_" == "__" ( set PATH=%BOOST_JAM_TOOLSET_ROOT%Other Metrowerks Tools\Command Line Tools;%PATH%) This code is expanded as if not "_%BOOST_JAM_TOOLSET_ROOT%_" == "__" ( set PATH=c:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003\Common7\Tools\\..\..\VC7\Other Metrowerks Tools\Command Line Tools;C:\Program Files\Microsoft DirectX 9.0 SDK (October 2005)\Utilities\Bin\x86;C:\WINDOWS\system32;C:\WINDOWS;C:\WINDOWS\System32\Wbem;C:\cygwin\bin;C:\Program Files\Common Files\GTK\2.0\bin;C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003\Vc7\bin) what leaves the script broken. I hope I could be able to make myself clear when trying to explain this. A quick workaround is to remove paths that contains parenthesis from the PATH environment variable, before running the script. Thanks, Marcelo Juchem