Well, stop the presses (but thanks for taking your time to help). I just saw an earlier post about the same issue. The answer was to disable "Audio normalize" in the "media" tab of "options". I did that and all is well. Just as a test, I closed V-pad, re-opened it, re-enabled "normalize" and the VOB files come in silent again. So, the issue is with normalizing the audio on import. Can't thank you enough for the help and attention. Have a great day.