Thanks, Thom. I didn't even know that Win 7 could do that. When I bought the computer in January, I reinstalled all my old apps, including that old version of Winzip, which probably reassociated *.zip files to itself. I'm going to uninstall the trial copy of Winzip, fix the association, and try it your way.

Oh, and in response to the suggestion from Gaieus: One of the routes that I tried during my workaround attempts was indeed a manual installation. I extracted to a temporary folder, then copied everything to Plugins. Sketchup 8 apparently could not see this, because it did not list Toolbars as an available Plugin to initialize. It was after this failed attempt that I did what I describe in the above solution.

My self-discovered solution took quite a bit of research, trial, and error, but here is its essence: Found out that Toolbars folder was stored in "Virtual Store" directory, following a defined Win 7 security protocol - probably because I used a very old version of Winzip. Deleted virtualized folder manually, replaced Winzip with up-to-date version (15). However, Winzip now could not extract because access was denied to Plugins folder. Turned off Win 7's User Access Control (UAC), succesfully unzipped and created Toolboars folder under Plugins, and copied & pasted existing custom *txt files into new folder. Returned UAC to original settings.

When I opened Sketchup 8, and initialized the Plugin, the custom toolbars were checked, but not displayed. Unchecked all toolbars, restarted app, then re-checked my customs. Finally, everything works again. Phew!!

Maybe someday, Microsoft will make an operating system that does not require a chest full of geekdom merit badges to use easily. I cannot imagine the average user trying to get through a confusing mess like this.

I built several custom toolbars for Sketchup 7, which I have been using for over a year. I recently installed Sketchup 8, and just tried to install Custom Toolbars - supposedly the corrected download. Very strange results. I cannot see or access the Toolbars folder or any of its contents in Win 7 Explorer! The files from the download are installed in Sketchup8/Plugins; I can see them through Winzip Extract, and I was able to successfully activate the Plugin through Sketchup 8 itself. However, without visibility in Explorer, I am unable to copy my custom *.txt files into the folder. Also not visible in CMD (DOS) screen.

Windows 7 just does not recognize their existence, but everything else does. I suspect some sort of error by Winzip 9.0 - possibly not registering the files properly - but don't know for sure. Any ideas about what has happened?