[endgame]

Thanks for the quick overview, ggpa. You encouraged me to give those areas my own look-see right away. Dxdiag shows that I am indeed running 9c, so check that one off. Good eye. Wouldn't have even thought about DirectX's influence. On to the next.

Noticed that my 'alternative' Bobble's mood icons were 16x16 (the Gloving Moods), so I copied and pasted those to the skin file for the test. Renamed skin.bin to oldskin.bin and gave it the whirl. No dice. Crash before opening screen. Hmmm.. Almost expected that.

Went back, grabbed the original files, wrote over the mood icons, deleted the skin.bin and renamed the oldskin back to the 'skin'. All good to go, opening screen arrived with no error.

At this point, unless your vast wisdom has another opinion, I still suspect the icon changes in conjunction with the skin rebuild. I guess the last test would be to rebuild the skin with NO changes made and see if that process, in itself, contains some step that will bog down the process.

Yes, I do want to use alternative icons. I should be able to do that if I choose. But....as you rightly stated, better to not have them and be able to play, than not. It just seems like such a little adjustment. Then, of course, I recall this is only Jan 02, and the draft hasn't even taken place yet because I've been so obsessed with finding out what causes this particular error since post-beta. I should probably just get on with the game and hope there is not a next error to distract or discourage me, eh?