Yes, we didn't need the 20 thousand lines of output, just the last line, as it does what I thought it might be doing, starting a low level calland not finishing it. core dumps and gdb won't help, even if you did have the duktape symbols, it is a deliberate abort because of some runtime issue not protected. I've sometimes thought I have to protect *every* duktape call we make, but so much overhead, in software and in performance. Not sure what to do about that. As a verification you can comment out html.c line 926 and it runs. I don't just want to protect the call set_property_string, though I may have to, I'd really like to know what is going wrong here. In jdb, try setting document.readyState = "complete" This is protected so won't core dump, but neither does it show any errors, even with dberr, and neither does it change the value of readyState, so the web page has done something to it. either it's not a string any more (getter setter), or it is not writeable. Karl Dahlke