Thanks, I eventually found it there. Seems that the helpfile is mapped to the classic version of adobe acrobat -- the first computer i tried viewing it on didn't have classic installed -- so it got all confused. i'm still trying to figure out why eovia would choose to embed the pdf inside the application, rather than making it available to say copy to another computer so you can read it in on-screen on one machine while working on another one. and in typical eovia fashion, the manual lacks many of the specifics that would make it useful -- like details on how the network render works -- does it treat mulit-processor machines as one or two nodes; is there a performance loss when a really slow computer is in the render chain; is there an advantage to having machines of equivalent speed or processor type; etc. now i have the jolly task of experimenting to figure this stuff out on my own. but hey, at least they threw the feature in. i suppose that's better than nothing. -scott