I know when you are moving a complex object it can show as a box but this appears to be permanent. I have imported a Lightwave object and it just wants to show it's self as a plain box which is presenting some problems when it comes to lighting. Also how can I best separate parts in a mesh like this? Does Decimate explode an object into it's indvidual parts? Sorry to be such a NOOB! :)

Go into your display options and enable background draw.  If your OBJ file contains separate parts of your model, Vue will retain those separate parts in its object list to select from.

If you prefer to use the Lightwave format, you may have to save each part of your model as a seperate lightwave file and import them one at a time into Vue.  There may be an option in Lightwave when saving an object to keep groups/objects separate.

It's probably a big object that has reached the max amount of displayed polygons set in your display options.
Go to your display options, and either untick the limit of displayed polygons box if you have a powerful machine, or raise this number if your machine is older. If you experience crashes or memory errors, you'll have to set this number lower again.

Mine is at 500,000 polys and it's displaying way more than that on the screen since I updated my video driver (3,000,000 something).  I don't trust Vue's poly count and so just watch the object count and resources free count.

That was it! Thank you both very much. I am doing a space scene and I am applying lights to a space craft and it was hard as all get up trying to do this to a big black box!