Hi Anakin

Well, I never guessed my Layer Palette problem would be anyone else's! -- so glad it came in handy, and in the nick of time for you too
How do you think yours came about?

Soquili/Bill and Sledger:
Thanks for all the tips and suggestions about system resources. Are you sure you're OK with me posting here about it? -- as it's not really anything to do with PSP.

I'd need to get back to you with more details about what loads at startup etc, as a bit short on time right now, but here are just the basic system details for now:

XP Pro v2002 Service Pack 3
Intel Core 2 CPU
6300 @ 1.86GHz
1.87 GHz, 2.00 GB of RAM

And yes, I do have a wallpaper and the present one is about 250 kb.

I also have a tuning/cleanup utility which is run fairly regularly (Ashampoo WinOptimizer 5), and have already got rid of quite a few things from startup -- not sure if Quicktime was one of them and would need to check and post again about all this, provided no one has an objection to going so off-topic.