Hmm random question: how old is your computer, or rather your graphics card? This reminds me of something similar I had quite a while back. I had two seperate graphics cards, one normal card and one 3daccelerator (voodoo1 ). There was a cable going from one card to the other and another one from one of the cards to the monitor. The signal had to go through both cards before it came to the screen. For some applications, however, the screen stayed black, although the application was obviously running. To solve this I had to change the cables so that the signal went directly to the monitor rather than through the second card. Hope this made sense Voller