possibly serious bug....need someone from HP...

[parisse]

Another thing that you should keep in mind when running solve or fsolve is that they expect the expressions inside to be continuous, otherwise you can't do much, solve won't work because polynomial-like equations are continuous, fsolve won't work because you can't apply iterative methods, think for example about bisection. There is no magic, before trying some bizarre input to solve, you should ask yourself could I do it by hand if I could compute very quickly? That's why you must learn the corresponding math before.