Could be a vid card issue then...I don't know if it was doing right after the install or not because I didn't use image planes for quite a while.

I;m past the image planes stage now on my current model so I'm not worrying about at the moment. going to upgrade mobo/cpu soon so I'll weather or not it keeps happening.

adldesigner: if need be I'll try what you suggested, thanks.

It's been my experience that Maya 5 is much less stable all round that 4.5 was, so it could just be something they'll iron out eventuallly.