Aimed at the younger end of the educational software market, Miffy's World Of Colour And Shapes is the latest title to be rediscovered and republished by GSP/Avanquest. As part of that process it's fully able to run on Windows Vista and, perhaps most appealing of all, it'll set you back less than a fiver.

For that you can access around 60 exercises and activities, which are tailored towards two- to five-year-olds. Given that we keep test subjects of such an age in the IT Reviews office on the off-chance that they'll be required, our pint-sized helpers were all too glad to get down to work.

The package itself requires no installation and actually works in a web window. That didn't go down too well with our copy of Google Chrome, though, which instantly detected the program as a pop-up and blocked it. A quick fiddle later and Miffy was ready for action.

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The program offers you four categories of activity at first, from a menu with no text on it whatsoever. Instead of text there's a friendly voiceover that describes each item as you hover the mouse cursor over it. It was a breeze (as you'd hope) to use. We accepted the invitation to learn colours and shapes first of all, and again were presented with a further visual choice of activities.

Once we clicked on one, Adobe Flash Player then threw up an error, claiming a potentially unsafe operation. Sigh. We loaded it up through Firefox instead, but the Flash problems followed us there. This was a significant problem, and we suspect that it'd stop many people enjoying some of the activities, when a supposedly simple educational program throws up quite confusing errors. Our tiny helpers looked perplexed (though by the time they're eight they'll probably be putting home networks together, the smart alecs).

Things didn't get better when we tried to watch some of the videos, which, after a bit of animation, simply resulted in a fast-forward icon appearing on a blank cartoon television screen. Then we switched to Internet Explorer, and like magic, they started to work. They're quite small in size, but perfectly fine and our anklebiters were happy enough to watch them.

Buoyed by our Internet Explorer success, we went back to some of the activities we'd had problems with. Again, no joy, but at least there was no pop-up error. Nothing happened at all, in fact. So we tried the 'colouring pictures' option instead, and that worked fine. Phew.

There are some good activities on this disc, at least the ones we could get to, but that sub-£5 price tag in this case hides a professionally presented program that we simply couldn't get to do everything it should.

We passed it on to one or two others who reported similar problems, and that's a real disappointment. It seems that security systems built around web browsers of all flavours prove to be Miffy's undoing, and as such this is a tricky program to recommend, despite its obvious qualities.

Technical woes that aren't really all Miffy's fault prevent an interesting educational program for young children from reaching its full potential.