Ummm, Flog? Did your friend loan you his -original- CD's? The reason I ask is that E-on has some anti-warez tricks built into the installer; there have been several attempts to rip Vue that made it to usenet, and -all- of them were unstable (and the bitching you heard was...fascinating). Seems that there is a finalization pass that only occurs if you are installing from the orignial discs. A copy does -not- function; I tried it when I got Vue 4 out of curiousity, and the copy install would crash as soon as you moved a simple primitive in the scene window (I was also running a properly installed version on another HDD, and -it- was performing perfectly, so it was nothing done to the OS). There are also some issues that can crop up if you are using a combo CDDVD drive. There are firmware issues, and potential buffer over-underrun issues, depending on the motherboard. davidryuen; Did you get those assorted XP2k boxes from the same source, by any chance? Because one issue that gets consistently missed is memory quality. Something like VuePro strains system memory in a way that not even shooters do. The sticks heat rapidly, and if they lack proper airflow (and heat spreaders if they are DDR sticks), then you =will= have crashes, no matter what you do. And a lot of companies that build boxes shop for the best buy, not consistent quality. Compaq in particular is infamous for that... That strain also affects the memory controller in the northbridge, and a lot of those neato looking fans don't do a very good job; in fact a lot of them are placed so that the only air they have to force over the northbridge is what comes off the CPU heatsink. Akin to cooling a car with boiling water.