gurusan, you're welcome.

Well, thanks to rge's detailed explanation all questions are already answered... Yes, current Linpack releases don't support Hyper-Threading, at least on Nehalem CPUs (PIVs with HT are ok AFAIK). But the fact that the executables in v10.1 started requiring external libraries makes me hope it is some sort of temporary move, and we'll get a newer version (hopefully with i7 support) soon.