Thanks for all the suggestions, ppl. Re the re-install questions, I uninstalled, rebooted and then re-installed. I'm a bit dubious about the gamma issue. If the monitor gamma were wrong, then how come the two color swatches in my second pix are different? To get that picture I used the color chooser to set a 50% gray, OKed it, then opened it again to take the screen shot and to show that the gray swatch in the color picker is correct, but the one in the tools palette is not. But, nevertheless, I fooled around with the RGB gammas using Adobe Gamma and sure enough, I can get the gray fill in my document and the tool palette color swatch to look gray. But then, all the other grays (e.g., inactive title bars) which looked correct before, now look wrong! This really has me baffled. I guess nobody from Adobe reads the forum, eh? Thanks again, Bill