{Sssssh, this old forum software! Attempt 3 - hopefully not eaten this time... } OK, did some Googling... Transparency is an issue with graphics packages it seems, particularly if they support ray tracing correctly. It puts a large load on the graphics card to display alpha transparency. (There is a kludge used in games to get transparency to render easily, but it impacts lighting results - so isn't the choice in 3D graphics packages.) Result may be transparent surfaces displayed as solid surfaces. Seems to fit. Per Alias' support pages for Maya, cards without Hardware Overlay planes give poor performance in OpenGL on Maya. Their sample list of cards is interesting as it correlates exactly with cards peeps are reporting having this problem with Studio: - NVIDIA TNT/TNT2/GeForce/GeForce2 - ATI Rage 128/Rage 128Pro - Matrox G400 - etc. All this is circumstantial of course, but it looks as if Studio may depend on overlay for rendering the "control balls" - it would certainly seem reasonable. And then any card resorting to software Overlay would have a harder time of it, whether due to lack of raw processing power, or card memory I was not able to glean. [Agreed new cards are not that expensive, even for PCI only systems. But my problem is a Matrox G400 3D-Flex card tied at the chip level to the expensive video capture card in my system.]