Hello, Thanks for all the answers. It seems that my problem was that I was not aware of some changes in the 7.9.1 version. I was finally able to make the 7.9.1 version operational by following the procedure in
http://orgmode.org/worg/org-hacks.html#compiling-org-without-make However, there are still some things I don't understand; there is this reference to the UTILITIES directory, which is absent in the distribution file for Windows. I later found out that one has to run the set-up script in the top directory of the distribution file. Regards, bostjanv