I should've been a bit more specific there, sorry about that! That's quite right, any file at all will work, ArtRage just looks for the filename.
That's great to hear, really glad it helped! I suspect you may have a setting or two in Pen Input in your Vista control panel at a guess which may be related to that problem when running under Ink Services, but there's not particular advantage to doing so, so the no_ink way of doing things should work just as well.
Dave
Resident Bug-Hunter
Ambient Design