The workbench is an eclipse application and is therefore a Java application. When you use the IDL Java Import bridge from an IDL workbench session, the call will use the Java session that powers the workbench. I suspect that when you are running command-line IDL, the IDL Java bridge call might be trying to use another version or configuration of Java that isn't compatible with IDL. A possible solution might be to point the Java library location to the java libraries located in the IDL installation. The location of the java libraries provided by IDL is shown below: "C:\Program Files\Exelis\IDL85\bin\bin.x86_64\jre\bin\server" Page 77 of the following document provides information how to set the preference: http://www.harrisgeospati...docs/pdf/bridges.pdf