Are you using binmode when writing the files?

No, I thought that were only important when dealing with different platforms. And it ran fine on the Windowsmachine and with Windowsclients.

Are the local settings the same on both machines? (As soon as you mention RedHat, I think of locale problems).

And how much I fought with them! They made me XEmacs broken, but that's another story. The locale setting differs: the good box has

LANG="en_US.iso88591"
SYSFONT="latarcyrheb-sun16"
[download]

LANG="en_US"
SUPPORTED="en_US"
SYSFONT="latarcyrheb-sun16"
[download]