A double two-degree-of-freedom control scheme is proposed for enhanced control of unstable delay processes. The scheme is motivated by the modified Smith predictor control in [IEE Proc. Control Theory Appl. 16(5) (1999) 359] and devised to improve in the following ways: (i) one more freedom of control is introduced in our scheme to enable manipulation of disturbance transient response, and is tuned based on minimization of the integral squared error criterion; (ii) four controllers in the scheme are well placed to separately tune the denominators and numerators of closed-loop transfer functions from the set-point and disturbance. This allows easy design of each controller and good control performance for both set-point and disturbance responses. Especially, improvement of disturbance response is extremely great, compared with JEE Proc. Control Theory Appl. 16(5) (1999) 359; Automatica 36 (2000) 1651]. Internal stability of the proposed structure is analyzed, which has not been reported in the literature on modified Smith predictor control before: Examples are provided for illustration. (c) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.