Hello (Hans), in MikTeX almost no environmental variables are set. Consequently some basic operations such as "ctxtools --update", "texexec --make --all", ... don't work. (ConTeXt doesn't know where to put the extracted downloaded files, where put the formats, ...) texexec does all kinds of trickery on many places, including MikTeX-dependent behaviour, but doesn't address this problem yet. If I ignore the lack of interest to support ConTeXt on the MikTeX side, some things could be improved on ConTeXt side as well. So: Would it be possible to set some basic environmental variables somewhere at the beginning, so that the "basic" functionality would be there for MikTeX as well? I tried to use the code below, but the problem is that I have no idea how to make changes to environmental variables global (the following code only changes it locally according to ruby documentation). somewhere around line 270 in kpse.rb: if Kpse.miktex? then # sets the TEXMFLOCAL according to the location of context.tex # although a bit of cheating, it should work in 99.5% cases ENV['TEXMFLOCAL'] = run("context.tex").gsub(/\/tex\/context\/base\/context.tex$/, '') end If this worked, other environmental variables could be set in a similar manner as well. (Another stupid part is that it would probably be necessary to distinguish between version 2.4 and 2.5 (which behave completely different and have different directory structure) in some parts, but that's already another story.) But at least ConTeXt (only the ruby version) now works with MikTeX 2.5. Thanks a lot, Mojca PS: one very strong reason why I currently use MikTeX is that metapost keeps crashing with the stand-alone distribution. It is sometimes very helpful to have both distros installed and use the one that works better for the particular task.