Sean,

I tried creating the Dr Watson file several times. Each time I deleted it before running Xara; the same file was produced every time.

I don't get any clue from Xara at all. After I start Xara, the hard disk thrashes for a few seconds then I get the "Xara has performed an illegal operation" dialog box, right when you would expect the Xara Splash Screen to appear.

I installed my old copy of CorelXara 2. That doesn't run either - nothing happens at all!

I strongly suspect my problem may lie in a system resource/function that Xara uses in some way. You mention removing all Xara DLL's - I completely deleted the Xara directory from program files, so does Xara put anything in Winnt/system? or system32?

You also mention CLSIDs in HKCR - I deleted all registry keys found by searching the registry for 'xara' - will I have missed anything by just doing that?

Its hard to pinpoint exactly when Xara stopped loading; I leave this development machine running 24hrs and it had been up over 2 weeks with several apps, including Xara, open all the time. Its not until I restarted recently after installing some more ram and tried to run Xara that I noticed the problem (I tried removing the ram, but that didn't change anything!).

There is nothing else that has changed software-wise on the machine, however I recall recently I visited WindowsUpdate at Microsoft and installed the latest Win2K security fixes.... sure that wouldn't be the cause [img]/infopop/emoticons/icon_confused.gif[/img]

Thanks for your help,

Stu.