Hi Richard Thanks for the reply but upto a week or two ago it was all working as it always had in versions of VS2005 to VS2015, you could tick the 'match case' checkbox and all others, but now you just see the text 'match case' with no checkbox. at first glance i dont have the down arrows showing the options but will study the links you kindly supplied to see if i can figure anything out. ive gradually got more peed off with microsoft over the years for making lots of stuff stop working, and changing things for no good reason, and ive been using their products since 1982. grrr regards Bob

This is going back 20+ years. We were writing software for a Diagnostic Imaging Center--one of those places with MRI, CAT, PET Scanners, and X-Ray machines. The business was still using IBM typewriters and hand faxing diagnostic reports to physicians. We wrote a system for them to compose diagnostic reports from templates, and automate the faxing. (C, dBase and Novell if anyone cares). I was in there one day debugging and had both a hex dump up and some source code. One of the radiologists (MD) comes over and asks how do you know how to do that and what all that means? I promptly responded, the same way you know that gray shadow on the mammogram is a mass and not an artifact. She got the point.

Coded first program in 1966. Solved Shrodinger Wave Equation given boundary conditions using Fortran which we had to learn on our own to do the homework for Physics class at Miami University. Since have programmed in assembly (mainframe and PC), PL/I (mainframe and PC), Cobol, Basic (original and later versions), Turbo Pascal, Delphi, Delphi Prism, RemObject's Oxygene. And dabbled in others including C#, Modula II, Ada, etc. I prefer the Algol derived langugages. Don't much care for C and its derivatives. Made a spreadsheet program for the mainframe in PL/I which IBM marketed and made $10 million from.