Sean, Thanks for your advice. I installed Xara on a second machine that was Win2K SP1. I applied SP2, then went to WindowsUpdate and applied just about everything going. Couldn't recreate the problem I am experiencing on my machine.

Thought I might try (as a last resort) copying every .dll from system & system32 on a healthy Win2K machine to my machine. However Sharing violations prevented that idea working, even when using two other networked machines to initiate and copy to my sick machine.

I can't think of anything else so it looks like I have no choice but to re-format. Here goes for some long hours...

Stu.