I know this won't help anyone debug but I just tried running gem update on my Fedora Core 3 install and it seqfaulted. I think the reason is that most of my upstream bandwidth was busy as was my downstream was being used and possible the download stopped. I had a similar problem earlier today in Windows when I was trying out a Java Webstart application. My first attempt dropped out with an exception (zip stream error) and the second time was fine. Rob -- Personal responsibility is battling extinction.