Welcome to the latest release of The ACE ORB (TAO). TAO is a freely available, open-source implementation of a CORBA 2.x-compliant ORB that supports real-time extensions. Please see www.cs.wustl.edu/~schmidt/TAO.html for more information on TAO features, services, and the status of current work. In addition, document for TAO is available in the $TAO_ROOT/docs/ subdirectory in HTML format. We welcome suggestions for improvement, bug fixes, portability enhancements, etc. and will strive to integrate correct bug fixes quickly! The current release has been tested extensively, but if you find any bugs, please report them to the ACE mailing list ace-users@cs.wustl.edu using the $TAO_ROOT/PROBLEM-REPORT-FORM. Please use the same form to submit questions, comments, etc. To ensure that you see responses, please do one of the following: 1) Subscribe to the ace-users mail list, by sending email with contents "subscribe ace-users" to majordomo@cs.wustl.edu. 2) Or, monitor the comp.soft-sys.ace newsgroup for responses. Thanks, Douglas C. Schmidt schmidt@cs.wustl.edu