Absolutely positive that there was nothing at all wrong with the settings and they're the same now as they were previously.

Thanks people for all your suggestions... a couple of reboots and a swift kick to the behind seems to have fixed it. This program will be the death of me... its so inconsistant!

Thanks xantor, but the background pictures were working fine before I installed SR4 Steph

Thanks for the advice, however I tried setting the background through the shaders, its not making any difference (even with a different background picture I'm getting the same effect. And all my renders/background pics are the same ratio at 4:3.

This is what I'm getting when I render in draft

This is what my background pic actually looks like - note the squashedness in the render above

When I render in production, up until last night I was oinly getting partial renders with maybe 1/4 of the image rendered correctly and the rest left as the tiled squared you see whilst its rendering. However as of this morning, its rendering completely black (and this is all images, regardless of background)

Time for a reinstall? I assume reinstalling doesn't affect all my downloaded products in the poser directories

Thaks Stacey (and Debbie :-) Steph