Hi .
I have a few .avi films 352x240 29.97fps i have converted them to pal and ntsc VCD using Nero 5.5.4 , but the quality is not very good (blocky picture and coloured squares appearing). Is this normal or should the quality be VHS quality .

"converted them to PAL and NTSC VCD using Nero 5.5.4" means exactly what?

If you have MPEG-1 videos, you don't need to convert them into anything, you just use Nero to burn them on CD and use them. Don't use Nero's own encoding, because its quality sucks -- and if you have MPEG-1 videos, never, ever re-encode them, the quality drops like 30-40% every time you re-encode videos (whether its from Divx to MPEG-1, MPEG-1 to MPEG-1 or MPEG-1 to DivX).

Thanks for the reply.
They were not MPEG vids they are about 200 megs in avi format , i use TMPenc normally but that wont support these avi's.

That's kinda weird, all programs that open AVIs use CODECs and all of them should be able to open the video just like any other program.