Garden flower photo day today, again without too much difficulty. The real issue was with DxO Optics Pro . I strongly suspect that a(nother) bug has slipped in in the last version. I can save my workspaces all I want, but when I load them again, it is still missing a number of settings. More experimentation needed, but for the time being I need to set all the parameters manually Every Time.
The other issues I have are that DxO, Microsoft Windows 8 and VirtualBox all seem to be buggy enough that together they crash about one run in 3. And when I restart Windows , it doesn't reconnect the network drives, for reasons that aren't obvious to me. I've found that the easiest way to handle it is simply reinstate an old version of a saved VM. It takes a while to unpack the tarball, but then the system comes up exactly as I want it. Since I'm not modifying anything on the local disk, there's no problem.