Hi again,

As a postscript: the only soundfont bank I could find in Win\Sys32\drivers is a 2MB job with Rev++ as part of the name. It looks exactly like the one that was default with the SB Live! retail card that I tried and found with only one synth. I've loaded it and will try actually playing something when I can close all the software I use during the day (it might really be a long scan when I turn the computer on again if I had to use the button with all this loaded).

While I'm hopeful that using Chaos is the cause of the midi problem, the last two crashes occured when the dialog saying I requested information from "go.microsoft.com" popped up with the dial or cancel option. Since I never requested anything that I know of from this URL, I'm trying to find out how to get rid of that now, though I can't see what it might have to do with midi playback using either soundfonts or GM.

all best,
mgj