happy new year! or it was :( I'm borrowing a friends machine while mines being fixed... I'm running PS6 which has been working perfectly for several days, then suddenly now when i open 'lighting effects' (everything else works fine), the dialogue window opens, but only the controls in the right half appear - not the preview window or anything on the left. This causes a crash - everything freezes - except the cursor - and i can't even ctrl/alt/del and have to shut down with the main off/on button. The owner re-installed PS last night, but it's still the same. He hasn't had any problems before (oops!) The only other thing i noticed was once (after the initial prob started) clicking on the zoom tool caused the same thing to happen - i haven't tried that again, just in case and the zoom tools work fine from the top menu bar. i've upped PS RAM from 50 to 64 and played around with graphics acceleration in control panel>system, neither helped. Info: Celeron 366 128 RAM, 90% free right now plenty of space on HDs Any ideas would be much appreciated... deadline approaching fast!! Thanks in advance, Soozie (also posting to hardware/tech forum)