Sherry, David, Herbert (and any silent readers!)

Sorry for the hiatus - digesting what's already been said, and other things to do .

In reverse order:
the search issue:
I have belatedly discovered the downloadable pdf of the User's Guide. Now that certainly improves matters considerably. But still, I had quite an extended session yesterday looking for the screen I referred to in my first post, and I still haven't found it. (It isn't a figment of my imagination. When I had it before, I tried varying a value and the effect was so extreme, I felt I didn't want to be side-tracked at that moment learning the calibration, and turned back to methods I was familiar with, as one does. ) I suspect it may have to do with 'offsets' or possibly 'duration' My search yesterday brought me back to 5.4.9.5,
"If the notes are played closely together, then Composer will display the notes as a single chord. If one note is played some significant amount of time before another note, then Composer will display that note as a grace note or as a normal note with a short duration, such
as a 32nd or 64th note."
I think the screen I found allowed me to quantify what that 'significant amount of time' was.
5.4.9.5 seems to me a suggestively one-sided entry: it seems to a require a companion which describes the converse process ?

Re the 'main issue': I have worked with your 'paste', Sherry, and I think have run through the permutations without really achieving what I want. More of this below.......

Herbert: I think your comment is a good one. I also find that 'stability' of setting can be an issue. One place where I find it is re whether I'm in select mode, (and if so which of the two I'm in) or entry mode - it seems to me that Composer sometimes switches from one to the other for no reason that I can see, in mid-process. e.g. sometimes when I've selected the region select arrow, it pops back to the spot arrow while I'm moving the cursor to the location. Conversely, the entry (+) mode sometimes auto-activates when I select a time-value, and sometimes doesn't. I think some of these variations (and I can think of other examples) may be related to how many changes have been made since I last 'saved' the file - it seems to me that sometimes a 'save' gets things moving smoothly again. Sometimes, one step further, if it doesn't, I actually close the file, and re-open it, and that often 'clears a blockage'.
What I now propose to do is to make further postings in this conversation at the 'sharing things with your fellow musicians' location, because I think that gives more scope for deviation; and I will try to find time to make a series of controlled sample swaps of part of the tune I'm working on back and forth, and post how it goes, maybe with the files.

BW

Ian G.