Ah, of course. The operating system is highly tuned to speed up hard disk operations, but not operations on removable-media drives such as CD's, floppies, or Zip drives. Emplode is very timing-sensitive, and the slowdowns from the CD drive must be what messed it up. Whenever I do anything with any kind of removable media, I copy my files to the hard disk before performing any operations with them. It's a good rule of thumb to follow for any kind of file on any intel PC.

I will try uploading a load of stuff tonight from the hard drive and see what happens.

It could, of course, having something to do with the cheap PC I bought - it was only GBP 239!!

Thanks again for the help

Phil