I draw your attention to a posting I made somewhere further up this voluminous thread...

It's horses for courses...if you're writing an app for a bank in Manhattan and they have P4 3.2HT PC's with oodles of memory and disk, you can use .Net and it will be happy. If you're working for a charity or other lower budget organisation, they can't afford or justify the hardware upgrades so you use a more appropriate tool.

But now it's time to get on with using that tool, and I'll do what I originally came here for...ask another stupid question...