While I do have sympathy, because I have been in that same boat before.... the sympathy is limited. I doubt seriously that it has anything to do with a 'joint effort' between MS and Adobe. While I do not consider MS to be an ethical company as far as their business practices go, I have to give them credit that they have managed to keep an awful lot of compatibility in place between their different versions of OS. Face it, technologies change, soon we will be living in the 64 bit world of hardware and software and one drives the other. For those who are not capable of keeping up, they will always be behind and be unhappy campers. For the rest, life will be great when it comes to the computing experience. A friend of mine is still trying to use Win 95, he is mostly successful, however, there are plenty of problems when he wants to change hardware or software. His tough luck for being bull headed. Folks should start thinking about where they want to be several years from now when it comes to their art work and the computer / OS that they use to create it with. If you are using 6 year old technology you will not have much of a leg to stand on when you start to complain. No offense to anyone, but I have been listening to this same complaint for a number of years and people should just really stop and think. Photoshop is expensive enough so that it is not sitting on every home pc, now is it. In other words it is not a $45 dollar shoot-em up game that will run on nearly every home computer. Its market is the art world and quite frankly if you can afford $600 US for PS, you ought to be able to afford a decent PC to run it on. Adobe has done a really good job of backward compatibility so do not blame them if PS is sluggish on your computer and you are using legacy hardware and software, blame yourself. BabaLouie