Quote - Well things got worse last night, as my computer just cut out twice, both whilst trying to render in UF!

This morning we hoovered it out!!!  There was a considerable amount of dust over the fans etc., and since we were told on a previous occasion that it was overheating due to excess dust (??????), we thought we'd give this a go ourselves as a preliminary attempt (so no-one can say it was dust and then charge us for it! lol!)

I then uninstalled several programs more recently installed, and came across something really wierd..  I had Squirls Water Reflections as a stand-alone programe on my drive, which I don't ever use.  OK, I thought I'd take that off, and it went through the uninstall process, but before finishing I was given the decision to make about certain associations this program had made elsewhere - namely, wait for it...  Ultra Fractal 3!!!  It was in quite a lot of places inside there, and as UF3 is the basic program upon which I downloaded the upgrades of UF 4.01 and then 4.03, I wondered if this just might be causing conflict!  For goodness sake, please no-one tell me it's an integral part of UF now!!!!  I mean it showed that the UF Server page was inside the Squirls Water Effects folder for goodness sake!!!  That was just one thing...

Then I took T's advice and rendered the image as a png file.  It worked.    And of course, instead of about 50MB filesize, it's about half!  And yet this wasn't one of my fractals that took many hours to render, it only took 50 mins in all - same as it told me it would take as a BMP.

At least I have achieved the render I need for this particular image, so we'll have to see what happens next!  I am backing up everything I want to keep as I go along at the moment, as I am indeed preparing for a reformat to be carried out sometime soon should the problems persist!

As for needing to hoover it out, I've worked with computers 15 years old in horrendously dirtly conditions and have never heard of them needing hoovering out before!  Makes my home sound filthy doesn't it?  But I can assure you, it's very clean, and hubby's computer has worked fine for years in this particular room...

The files being in the wrong place could be a "Registry" issue. The Windows Registry keeps track of where files should be....There are some registry repair programs that may help.