This could occur for one of three reasons. The first is that you are specifying a job name via the -j switch to A-Shell (or PolyShell). The second is that you are using TRMDEF statements in the miame.ini to assign job names, and A-Shell is not generating "unique enough" device identifiers (possibly due to an incorrect CONSOLE statement.) The third is that the specified job has partially crashed but still exists in the job table. Under UNIX, A-Shell will prompt you directly to see if you want to kill the conflicting job, which usually takes care of the problem. Alternately, you can have another user (who is already in A-Shell and can get to the dot prompt) execute SYSTAT/K/Z to clear any zombies or phantoms. Under Windows, this is not possible, but you can still have another user remove the dead job with the QUTL command. Or, you can just specify the -j switch with a known-unique job name.