I figured out that I had set the harddrive I was trying to edit on (in win2000p) as a read only - not alowing any modifications or changes to the drive. But virtual dub (VD)needs to create (write) a log file to do two pass encoding. I simply went to the properties tab for the drive letter that I was running VD on and removed all resrictions. Then I returned to VD and ran the rendering operation fine.