Thanks to all of you who gave attention to my problem. It was caused by something very stupid: a copy of some cont-sys.tex file was left about in same directory as my test file. After removing it, everything went fine. A suggestion for Hans: wouldn't it be a good idea to insert the following lines into the readme.txt file of mswintex.zip? It informs the user that cont-lmt.zip should also be downloaded and unzipped into the proper subdirectory. Or even better, can't you include the cont-lmt files into mswintex.zip in order to make points 3 and 4 superfluous? Installation of the minimal ConTeXt distribution for Windows: 1. Download mswintex.zip from Pragma 2. Unzip into C:\ (all files and directories are now under C:\tex) 3. Download cont-lmt.zip from Pragma 4. Unzip into C:\tex\texmf-fonts 5. Start a CMD shell and run the commands: > cd c:\tex > setuptex.bat > mktexlsr > texexec --make --alone nl en metafun "C:\" can be replaced by any other (sub)directory name Sytse Knypstra