I was exchanging emails with a BottomFeeder user who was having trouble getting the application to run on her Mac. I should be embarrassed - she diagnosed the problem (which is a base VW issue) before I did. If you try either vwnc or BottomFeeder on a Mac running OS 8 or 9, and it crashes without coming up, here's the answer:

According to a bug with the VisualWorks own Help files, if the display color depth is set to anything greater than 24bits, a similar "primitive has failed" error occurs. Well, I changed the depth to 256 colors and...voila!

So there you have it - do I have hard working users, or what?