This whole autoredraw deal has been causing me a good bit of consternation lately. You see, I've got this little tank game, but if anything goes over it's picture or you switch windows and then go back, the picture is cleared. So I tried using autoredraw. Right after the city is drawn and the tanks are placed, I set autoredraw to true and then set the form's picture property to it's image property. Voila! My city and tanks stay on the form. Now here's the problem: I can't update the picture. If autoredraw is set to true, and I try to shoot at another tank, the shell's path and the explosion flicker and then disappear right away. So I tried setting the autoredraw to false and then drawing. This works, but now the image can be cleared again. If I set autoredraw to true again, all my changes are gone! It's really frustrating, so I apologize if this post seems a little angry or incoherent.