Well I have more questions, but using Houdini is easier now that I that I understand the quirks of its interface.

First is the hard crash (Win2K freeze) I experienced. Here was the situation.
I created a Bezier grid. To this grid I added Edit and Fractal ops to make cheesy terrain.
Then created a second smaller NURBS grid, in same Geo node. To this smaller grid I added Edit ops to bulge it some.
I then Paste -ed the two surfaces together. The smaller NURBS grid was appliqued to larger Bezier ‘ground’ surface. Here I must say that Paste OP is one of the coolest features I have seen. It holds many posibilities. The Paste used Parametric feature option.
I then animated the UV coordinates in Paste Op to slither the smaller NURBS surface along larger Bezier one.
In scrubbing through animation everything was fine.
Then I pressed PLAY button. The animation played, but in middler (frame 186 out of 300) the OS froze. It was a hard crash requiring use of reset button.

Now for the question.
In SHOP I created a simple Surface Shader called Surface1
In VEX I created a network to add patterns and bumps to the shader.
The simple geometry was defined to use Surface1 as shader.
However during test render,none of the VEX work rendered. Probably becouse I did not tie VEX to SHOP.
So how do I that?
Actually I am confused how shaders and VEXs are tied to geometry.
THX alot.

P.S. another user here, Alex, confirmed the WACOM RMB problem in Viewer. Basically Houdini requirews that stylus be held more stably in viewer for RMB pop-ups then is practically possible. All hands move and shake just ever so slightly. I think SideFX should address this issue.

Dave Rindner

If it's an operating system freezing issue, then it points to display drivers as the most likely culprit. Like it has been mentioned time and time again, make sure that you:
- Use the latest reference drivers for your video card. eg. for nVidia-based cards, download the latest ones from their website. Remember that if you use any “beta” drivers, they're beta for a reason.
- Make sure you have latest the service pack installed for your operating system. For Win2K, service pack 2 is essential, for WinNT 4, service pack 6 or above is recommended.
- If you're using an Athlon-based CPU on Windows 2000, then installing the AGP patch is recommended especially if you experience random freezes on your system. See http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/TechnicalResources/0,,30_182_871,00.html [amd.com]