(semi)Successful Maxima 5.9.0 installation under Windows Millennium

Dear Michel,
Dear David,
Dear Mike,
Dear colleagues,

I am extremely thankful to Michel for all of his so kind and detailed
comments sent to me yesterday mainly with respect to the Maxima
5.9.0 installation of David's recent test Windows binary release. These
have been very useful to me.

I must sincerely apologize that ignoring fundamental things about
Maxima, XMaxima, their interaction and Windows, I have proceeded
to incorrect comments.

Now I understood that the delays were mainly due not to the Maxima
5.9.0 files and installation, but just to multiple Maxima sessions, probably
both 5.5 beta and 5.9.0 sessions simultaneously. As I have been advised
by Michel, I have to close Maxima sessions by using quit(), if necessary
by using Alt+Ctrl+Del and selecting Maxima.(Of course, I cannot exclude
interaction problems between the two versions too if both are used one
after the other on the same machine even not simultaneously.)

In this way, the situation has been significantly improved and now Maxima
5.5 beta loads in about 5 sec and Maxima 5.9.0 in about 10 sec (on an ]
850 MHz Pentium machine), which is very reasonable.

I also understood that I should not expect to put Maxima in the Program
Files directory, where most Windows programs reside, because of the
space between Program and Files in this directory.

One more piece of help would be extremely useful to me. Although I
understood that quit() closes Maxima, but not the XMaxima tcl window,
which has to be closed separately, I have still not a clear idea why I
cannot successfully use the writefile() and closefile() commands (in both
releases 5.5 beta and 5.9.0 I mean) and the resulting files are generally
zero-byte long. Have you been successful with this particular and so
useful Maxima writing-to-a-file task so far under Windows (in my case
the Millennium edition)?

I am grateful to you for your precious help.

Please accept again my apologies for the wrong information yesterday.
This was due to my incorect use of Maxima (multiple sessions) and not
to David's recent Windows release of Maxima, which is actually working!

Kindest regards from Patras,

Nikos