. You got it! I discovered long ago that WHERE you zoom in makes a BIG difference in speed; the "chaotic" areas clearly take more time (iterations) since that is needed to distinguish the points and pixels. Obviously, the closer you are to a "lake" area the greater the chaos. Note that many deep zooms on the web are zooming into the west needle ..... [I am guilty of that also <G>]. Now waiting for a truly refined and debugged XFractInt to give me the final reason I need to get into Linux ... .