This patch should allow Aspell to compile with VC++. The changes were submitted to by Francois Boudreau : It's a bit of a mess, we were not very consistent in our editing. We went for the quickess fix, so a few things were just disabled, like file locking and locales. And we had to remove a few const. I, the author of Aspell, do not even know if it will work or the other steps needed to get Aspell to compile under Win32. If you have problems with this patch please contact Francois Boudreau and not me since I do not have a copy of VC++ and in general dislike Microsoft Windows. Kevin Atkinson