Posted at the weekend and got no responses (I guess I either blinded you all with science, or baffled you with bulls***!!)..so I'll try again with a different angle..

Firstly, my PC spec
1 ghz Athlon, 394mb ram, 28gb hard drive (1x8, 1x20)-a single 5gb partition reserved for music or video editing (Regularly defragged and cleared out), TNT Riva 32mb graphics card. Network card connected to cable modem, Win XP Pro, Hauppauge Win TV/FM card.

The last two items have been upgraded since the last time I had need to capture video. I was on ME with a BT848 card, but as I could not get that to work under XP, I went for the Hauppauge one. The software has Win2000 TV viewer and TV32 viewer-both of which work ok..there is also a vidcap program which I wouldn't use as I've always used Virtualdub.

I now want to capture some video to burn to VCD, so I only need 352 x 288. I went through the 'How To' files on here just as a refresher before I started, set everything on VirtualDub as before and copied...straight away, I noticed a really bad drop out rate-approaching 10%..

Shut down, rebooted-read some of the mails on this forum..shut down all I can (I have a cable modem now, so as I'm 'Always On' I won't close my Firewall) and tried again..same problem.

I watched it record around a minutes footage and it seemed to record ok for a few seconds, then drop a load of frames, record ok for a few seconds, then drop a load more..etc..etc.. I tried capturing via the composite input or via the RF link from my source (Hi-Fi stereo VCR)

Is there a problem with XP and virtualdub, or the Hauppauge cards and virtualdub? I'm at a loss to understand whats happening