. following this win-10 issue, I will just say that I have given up on microshaft, if possible, for good. I am still using XP on a couple of my systems - and quite satisfied. One of them runs fractint no problem, the other doesn't - so it must be hardware issue. I never bothered with any OS after XP, although I have win-7 at work. I am sick of this forced upgrades every 2 years, just when you start getting comfy with the OS, and the lack of backwards compatibility is deliberate treachery on Mr. Bill's part. Sooo - I have been migrating to Linux, about 80% complete now. It is much leaner than windoze; I just made a 32K frame animation at 1400 resolution - the file barely fits on a DVD. WinXP can not open and play it, but in Linux it cruises no problem! I installed DOSbox, but haven't had time to play much with it yet. I am pondering trying xfractint now, or maybe wait till it gets more refined. Whatever. As for sstools.ini - I have always had all my fractint files in one same directory - so no need to mess with file paths; seems to work better. And it shouldn't have lines that aren't being used, you can put a semicolon in front to comment them out. If you are rendering from a PAR file the PAR values will override the sstools.ini - some people don't know that and it leads to errors and confusion.. .