[amelia] error message and very slow imputation

Hello, I am using Amelia to impute missing values in two large data files and a third smaller file. The smaller file, which contains 19 variables and 866 cases, imputed fairly easily and quickly both with and without transformations. The two larger files are another story completely. One of them, which has 87 variables and 16,491 cases, was imputed over the course of several hours when I set Amelia only to transform the continuous variables with skewed distributions. However, when I tried to set Amelia to also transform all nominal and ordinal variables, I received this error message: Error in La.svd(x, nu, nv) : error code 1 from Lapack routine 'dgesdd' I decided to set only some of the ordinal and nominal variables to transform, and Amelia began its work. Well, it's been working for 84 hours and it's only on imputation 2! Imputation 1 had a chain length of 266 and imputation 2 is currently at 229. I also set another large file, with 286 variables and 3,305 cases, to be imputed by Amelia on a different computer. I started the imputation process at roughly the same time (84 hours ago) and it appears that it has finally made it to imputation 3, with chain lengths of over 2,000 for the first two imputations. Also, I had downloaded the newer Amelia program this past Saturday but it would not run these larger files--it appeared to freeze when I hit "impute." So I went back to the earlier version of Amelia I had downloaded in January, and this version is imputing the large data files, but obviously very slowly. Could there be something wrong with my settings causing this extreme slowness? Or does it simply take this long to impute large data files? Thanks, Mari Cunnington Doctoral Student Teachers College, Columbia University -- -Mari