thanks gent and allnatural. i used camstudio. it works nice. i have windows media encoder 9, it doesnt capture a certain part of the screen which is what i want. i used it to convert a flash movie to avi tha i made. that flash app can't save the movie to avi with all the details i want(animation-in-animation). i got sick of trying on flash so i thought i'd just capture it off my screen.