i am reading Tip and Trick of the windows programming gurus and on the included cd youy get the DirectX 6.1 SDK. Is it ok to use 8.1 or will that interfere with things satated in the book

It should work, but you may have to type something like
#define DIRECTX_VERSION 0x6000 or something. I think it specifies in the ddraw header. When i read the book i had seven, and i just changed everything from 6 to 7 and it worked fine. I know you couldnt do that with 8 extactly because there is no directdraw in version 8.

thanks