‘In the forum I found a note going back a couple of years about going into view|edit details, but in my VMS 9 I do not have this view. It would appear also that ‘paste event’ does not paste the event duration (unless I have missed some settings)’
I think that you are talking about the menu OPTIONS-PREFERENCES tab EDIT. This one is present in Vegas Movie Studio. Here you can indicate the duration of stills that are added to the timeline and the number of frames they should overlap.
However, a negative value for the overlap is not possible, so an automatic gap seems to me not possible. And also is this setting only used for stills that are added to the timeline. Changing these settings has no effect on events that are already present on the timeline.
As you mentioned also in another topic, scripting would be the answer. Unfortunately, that is still not supported in Vegas Movie Studio.
Theo