When i have finished a ride and saved my track on my eTrex h, i then download it into Mapsource, sometimes it tells me the total elapsed time and total distance and sometimes it doesn't, what am i doing wrong, is there some better software to use or have i screwed something up ?

try Mapyx Quo Here. the software is free and they have the cheapest OS digital mapping I've seen.

What do you mean by saved the track?
On most eTrexes, if you save the track it will compress it, and strip off the timestamps. So you can't get any time/speed data when you download it in Mapsource.

So instead, don't save the track, just download the "Active log" into Mapsource. That should have all of the time data included.

Ahh right i see, yeah been saving the tracks after a ride on the GPS in the thought that it would save all the relevant info up to that point, obviously not.