SWAMP, I just checked and the Visual Basics stuff is still there, in Windows/system32 I extracted the VBRun.exe into another folder and compared all the files, yep I must have already installed it for MAT Pose Edit and who knows when that was, so I'm not doing another System Restore. I'm not wholly convinced that VB is the problem, I've got the Visual Basics on the Win98SE machine too and IM works there - go figure. Besides, I'm going to need them for MPE, which btw is a very cool app! Thanks for all the help :))