Hello Hans, one weird question: after the question has been posted to the mailing list, I tried to run \starttext \startMPcode draw fullcircle scaled 3cm; \stopMPcode x \stoptext on the garden. That works OK with pdfTeX, but doesn't work with XeTeX. I have checked that locally on my machine. I did the following: - I have set shell_escape = f in texmf.cnf - I comment out the two lines in cont-sys.tex: % \runMPgraphicstrue % \runMPTEXgraphicstrue "texexec bla" now creates bla-mpgraph.1, while "texexec --xtx bla" doesn't. Any clue? Thanks a lot, Mojca