I'm generally becoming more reluctant to answer newbie questions (because I tend to be bombarded off-list by emails of the "thanks for answering that question, but now I have several more" kind), but this one has been well formulated in terms of describing the SPM version, the updates that were installed and the fact that you have looked through the manual and are trying out the example data sets. The problem sounds like the file selector hanging for some reason. It is producing the figure, but not getting as far as drawing the various panels. Is it possible that there is a seriously large number of scans in the directory, and maybe it is taking a very long time to list them all? Other than that, I can't see what the cause of the problem would be. Try changing to another directory (possibly with fewer files) and typing the following: P=spm_select; If this doesn't work, then I'll need to have a bit of a think. Best regards, -John On Friday 10 October 2008 08:51, Richard Morris wrote: > Dear SPMers, > > I'm a newbie and I've just installed SPM5 and the update (1782) on my > intel mac (10.5.5), and I'm going through the practice data set (MoAE) > but there is a problem. After selecting New Realign:Estimate and > Reslice, and opening a new session, I try to specify files but SPM/ > Matlab just brings up a grey window titled Session. And nothing else > seems to happen. I'm expecting to see the SPM file selector window. > > Have I made a mistake in the installation? Or is there something I'm > missing? > > Thanks for helping out . . > > Rich > > Prince of Wales Medical Research Institute > Randwick NSW 2031 > Australia