I have a 17" 2.5ghz MBP, 4ghz Ram, 512mb graphics, 200 gig 7200 rpm hdd, 6 months old.

Currently have Vm fusion installed, Windows Vista partitioned for 50 Gig.

i'm an engineer and use modelling programs like Autocad 2007 and Pro Engineer.
I currently have these both installed and Autocad works fine. However, pro engineer is slow as anything.

Is it possible to open it in bootcamp or do i need to install another copy of vista on bootcamp then install pro Engineer onto that copy of vista?

I'm just thinking the intensive software would run better in bootcamp with the whole omputer resources dedicated to it rather than through vm fusion. I have never used bootcamp and have no idea how to use it

Will this improve the performance of pro Engineer?
What is the best way to run this/these couple of programs?

I've run Pro/E WF4 under boot camp with no issues (24" iMac 2.4Ghz). However I found that license only works for one of Bootcamp and VM Fusion - i.e. if I install it when I'm in Bootcamp it won't run in VM and vice-versa. I believe this is to do with the MAC address, so it may be possible to work around.

I would expect the performance under Bootcamp to be signifcantly better as Pro/E taxes the GPU quite heavily and you are probably not getting 3D acceleration in VM.

It looks like i will have to uninstall my current vmfusion vista and install vista via bootcamp and then link it to vmfusion to also use as from all the info i can find only seems to go from bootcamp to fusion not fusion to bootcamp

I'd try XP before throwing away your VM. Vista is hellishly slow with anything so I'd consider optimising your OS before enduring the inconvenience of having to restart your machine.

Apparently Microsoft has said you can request a free copy of XP if you are an unhappy Vista customer, may be worth taking advantage of that.

Vista would be perfectly fine with that hardware and he says that AutoCAD works well for him. The problem is definitely going to be related to not having proper graphics acceleration.

have removed vmware and the partition set for it.
currently going to install vista on boot camp then link that partition to fusion later on.

this will allow me to boot into windows to run proE, autocad, matlab etc using the whole system specs and also boot into vmware for quick easy access to windows stuff that is not that resource hungry.

quick question: when i partition a space for boot camp, will it delete everything from my current mac hdd or does it just split up the nominated hdd space for the widows? basically will the partitioning format my hdd? - i really hope not

It doesn't delete anything, it just splits up the current HD.

ok have everything installed with bootcamp now, how the hell do i do right clicks with the touch pad now?

have the latest version of bootcamp installed to suit vista

Have you installed the Windows drivers off the 10.5 DVD?

From memory, there's an option to have two-finger+click as right click, or alternately you can use the enter key as right click too.