Thanks,
I'll clarify.
these are the only 2 I have tried.
The drag and drop looks like its working fine. But plugin never shows up anywhere in paint.net.
You ask: "Are you placing the plugin .dll into the PaintDotNET Effects sub-folder?"
As I said, I did that for one of them only because I could not see a dll for the other.
Yes Vista is up to date. What version of pdn? I am not sure how to tell. It was the most recent when I downloaded it about 6 months ago.
Have done it over several times to try different things. What else can I try?