Bill
I was expecting your reply as below, but due to the delay
bounce as I get the digest version, I did not correct
my previous post, in that, the name of the star catalog
is xz80p (no extension) although win2000 does recognize
it as a DAT file (?) things I have also tried, I removed
the xz80_zip files from Guide dir,
caps and non_caps
XZ80P & xz80p
I change the name of the xz80p.txt file in case there was
some confusion.
the first line of the tdf file is
file xz80p
so I remain bewitched bothered and bewildered :)
but happy to report I've had no crashes with any version of
Guide8 to date, so I do do some_things correctly...
but I assume this is user error, but I'm blind to it...
more ideas are welcome...

******************** Bill posted 03 oct .... **********
Paul, I think your only remaining sticking point is that the data file
is XZ80P, no extension, not XZ80P.DAT. (This corresponds to the
name of the file when you've downloaded and decompressed it. In
cases of doubt, you can look at the .tdf file, which always gives the
file name as the first thing. In some cases, including this one, the
text on the 'extras' page will give some information about this, too.)