Michael's suggesion: Open file in Draw 9 and save as a version 5 cdr file. No luck. Behaves the same as the file from the clipart CD.

Athena's suggestion: Open in Draw and copy and paste into Xara. Again no luck. Only parts are pasted in Xara and colors are changed.

Allison's suggestion: Open in another program. Tried opening file in Publisher 2000. File imported but was messed up.

My solution: Opened file in Draw 9, added rquired text and resized to that needed for poster. Exported as a TIF which I then imported into my Xara file. Client is happy with result.

Glad to see others have experienced the same problem for a while I thought I was going senile.

I would like a better solution that having to go through a TIF because there is really some excellent stuff on the Draw clipart Cd. I often use the draw clipart as a starting point for new designs. Perhaps one of our gurus has some thoughts on how to deal with this kind of problem.

Thanks to everyone for their replies.

John