Patrick and all:

Yes, I too convinced myself that "Alt-." and "Alt-;" meant holding the Alt key down while typing the other character(no minus). This is consistent with the notation for the other hotkeys, as listed in the hotkeys list available in the Help menu. When typing those keystrokes I got no response other than an error beep.

Still, even though I'd convinced myself that was what Alt-. indicated, I went ahead and tried it with the minus key inserted as well. No response again...until I zoomed out to a level 2 display with a 92 degree field width, and my machine took ~30+ seconds to draw all objects to something like 14th magnitude! Evidently I stumbled on the evil Alt-minus hotkey that Bill described in an earlier post.

Incidentally, displaying planetary features is not a high priority with me, being primarily interested in comets and deep sky. I'm not whining...just curious as to why these hotkeys don't seem to be working for me (and Patrick).

I wonder if it could be related to the problems mentioned by Bill in connection with AMD-K6 processors and compiled code. My machine has an AMD-K6-2.