I have not changed anything on the XP side and this problem started all of a sudden a few days ago maybe through a windows auto update ??. I have found today that copying the two files from the Common Files\autodesk shared folder into the Autocad 2000 folder they now load up automatically. There is still another dbx file that I can't get to load automatically and have to load it manually but the program all seems to work ok after I do, so that problem I will have to live with for a while until I get time to have another go.