you’re right, david. the rendered clip played fine in vegas trimmer/preview, and when converted to flash.
interestingly, i’ve found that WMV is a good intermediate when going from vegas (HDV original) to flash for some content. for this piece, it looked better than the MOV and AVI w/Cineform.i clicked on it in windows explorer just to see that it ran, looked up and saw the grey black. i won’t get fooled again. (thanks to the who…)