Thanks for all the replies. I don't think it can be the firewall as it is
disabled.
I haven't been able to get maxima to run from the command line either but
since I was hoping to set maxima up on winxp for a high school student, I
hadn't intended to use maxima in that mode anyhow.
At the moment, I'm stymied. It seems strange that maxima should run OK on
some installations of winxp and not others. Are there any other winxp
settings that could be relevant to this problem? Please pardon my questions,
I've been using linux for the past five years and I'm pretty rusty on winxp.