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SPECiAL THANKS TO THE NEW YORK TiMES
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ORiGiNAL WRITTEN BY: PETER H. LEWiS
ASCii TRANSCRiPTiON BY: DROP SQUAD
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        AUSTiN, TEXAS, OCT.26 - The International Business Machines 
Corporation said today that it had briefly halted production of its 
new operating system software, OS/2 Warp, to correct a flaw.
        An I.B.M. spokeswoman said production of a repaired version of
the software had resumed and that "very few" unfixed copies of the 
$80 software package had reached stores. 
        "We discovered it early in the manufacturing process and decided
to fix it," said Allison Johnson of I.B.M.'s Personal Software Products
division here. "We could have posted a fix on the bulletin boards or
sent out replacement disks, but because it was so early and it was an
easy fix, we stoppped the line briefly."
        News of the production problem, first reported today in The 
Boston Globe, comes as the computer maker is beginning an intense and
expensive effort to establish OS/2 Warp as a serious challenger to the
Microsoft Corporations Windows operating system, currently the dominant
software in the personal computer industry. Operating system software
controls the critical functions of a computer and is the platform upon 
which all other software applications, including data bases and word
processors, operate. 
        Analysts said the discovery and repair of the problem, which
apparently was obscured enough to have avoided detection by more than
10,000 outside testers of the woftware in recent months, was routine by
the standards of the software industry.
        "It would seem like it's business as usual, and it doesn't seem
like a huge bug," said John M. Dodge, senior executive news editor for
PC Week, and industry newspaper in Medford, Mass. that has evaluated the
software.
        Many if not most software companies routinuely send out "bug fixes"
to correct problems discovered after consumers begin using the products.
For example, Adobe Systems Inc., of Mountain View, California last week
sent out a replacment disk to correct a simple problem that would have
caused its Photoshop 3.0 program to stop working at the end of the year.
        Even so, Mr. Dodge said, the flaw in OS/2 was troubling because it
suggests the software "still has some rough edges."
        "It has a lot of neat features, but getting them to run smoothly
may be a little bit complicated," Mr. Dodge said, especially for the 
consumer audience I.B.M. is trying to reach.
        The flaw appears to affect computers that have a filed called
"config.bak" in the root directory. Anyone who suspects he or she has a
flawed version of the software can rename the file "config.old" to avoid
the problem, which prevents Windows and DOS software from working properly
under OS/2 and I.B.M. spokesman said.





