I have now solved the mystery, Gaieus, though I only half-understand.. Turns out it was a ruby of some kind, either purchased or downloaded from the kind people on this forum. Not that the ruby itself was defective - just was either replicated or was residing in the wrong folder. My process was to remove all rubies temporarily, remove Sketch Up Pro and then do a clean reinstall. From this point I had no problem finding and activating the DC components toolbars. And, incidentally the sand box toolbar which also wasn't behaving. I'm now in the process of adding the rubies back in, very slowly and one or two at a time, then closing and reopening Sketch Up to see which was the conflicting script. Thanks for all the comments and support! Nigel

If you are upgrading or downgrading, do not copy the Plugins or Tools folders over between versions - Ruby files in the wrong version of SU are a frequent source of bugsplats. When you uninstalled before reinstalling, did you check what files and folders the uninstall had left behind, and delete those "manually"? Also, are you using Windows Vista? There have been problems with the SU Startup application that do not appear if you open SU by double-clicking on a SKP model in Explorer. Anssi

I wasn't expecting too much, apart from MMS. I have yet to really test all features, but what I have seen, it is certainly a welcome improvement.

"Shift and tilt" actually comes from the world of view camera photography. Lets say you photograph a building with the base of the camera parallel to the ground. You don't want to tilt the camera up because that might cause the verticals to diverge. With a view camera, you can move the lens up while the film of sensor stays where it is. This allows you to get the top of the building into the scene while keeping the verticals parallel. You can also tilt the front lens board of the camera. When you tilt the lens you also tilt the plane of focus. Imagine photographing a brick driveway leading up to a house. Your client is the brick maker and you want all of the bricks to be sharp right from the front of the camera to way off in the distance. To do this, you tilt the lens in the direction of the bricks. The irony is that this technique was originally used to make things sharper. Recently it has become fashionable to either use a large camera to simulate a small simple camera or to isolate the area of greatest interest by throwing extraneous elements out of focus. To do this you just tilt the lens back until only a few bricks in the driveway are in focus. The tilt is also know as the Schiemphlug (SP?) effect after its inventor. In essence, blurry has become the new sharp.

Hi Jim. Many thanks for the Form Fonts prompt. For the life of me, I couldn't recall the name of that website! I'll trot off and check it out now. Cheers, Nigel

You are welcome, Nigel. Hope you find what you are looking for, I remember seeing something similar discussed over there. Guite