Thank you folks. I have taken on some of the suggestions here and tried the simple one first - a system restore - and it worked an absolute treat! Should have thought abot doing that originally but it never occurred to me.

Thank you very very much.

On another note (and this might have been covered elsewhere), the MPEG2 encoder in Ulead is a bit crap isnt it? Any suggestions for a decent (and preferably free-to-download) AVI to MPEG 2 encoder I could use intead of the one built into the software.

With my full thanks...