Dave,

I had used previous versions of MGI Videowave and Ulead VideoStudio with little joy on a Win2K box...thought I might wind up buying a Mac -- I was using it mostly to capture from analog sources through my ATI AIW Radeon.

Recently, I upgraded the Win2K machine to a dual 866 with 512 MB of RAM and made the leap to Videowave 5. It isn't perfect (I get some sound crackling *during* capture), but the results have been pretty good. I'm capturing mostly direct from a panasonic DV camera into a generic (Kouwell??) 1394 card. I don't have any solid sense of what your problem might be...I'd start looking at service packs, video/sound driver revs, that sort of thing. Also, there are a few patches out for Videowave, but be careful*

I have not yet tried VCD creation, but am on the verge of doing so. I have created some 150-200MB travelogues from recent DV footage with no hiccups.

Can I assume you are running version 5?

MGI doesn't seem to have tech support per se (or you have to buy per-incident support or something), but they have what seems to be a fairly active "bitch-and-moan" BBS. I've seen some comparisons there as well to other Windows packages. It's my sense that there is no single leader in Windows editing software.

Have you thought about buying a Mac??

(I couldn't resist! Happily, VW5 seems to be working well enough for me on Win2K right now that I have avoided that question...)

*some posts on the MGI BBS about VW5 patches scared me away from applying any of the current patches.

Jim