Good morning all,

Well, the chronicle isn't ended. I did all the wiping and installing and everything worked except midi playing, although it did go on longer before the crash and the inability of Creative things to load from shortcuts.

Maybe due to an error message when the installation was 95%done and it was updating windows drivers: it was unable to locate component--The app failed to start because Plx.core.plx was not found.

So, I re-enabled normal start up, restarted and did the "repair" installation. Now everything loads upon click, so everything works, except you know what, to paraphrase Harry Potter.

Later, after the daily programs are done with, I'll do the "just in case the sweep and install doesn't work" solution, which is to move the care to another PCI slot, so Windows differently allocates resources. If that doesn't work, who knows....

I have an idea (more an intuition) that my video card drivers might be causing a problem. There is an NVIDIA display driver and and NVIDIA win 2000/XP display drivers installed. Perhaps a result of upgrading from ME to XP, so perhaps they should both be there. But I suspect Windows would have generic drivers that would work okay if I uninstall the NVIDIA ones.

But I'll probably just write back to Creative and tell them what happened (and didn't) by following the instructions they sent, and see what they say. It looks like the music writing is pretty much done until they figure it out. (Though Composer crashes like everything else, I did enter a few individual notes without it crashing. Interesting that the first note took forever to appear and sound, but the next few entered normally. I said few because I don't know how many I could enter before the crash, if it happens--and if it does, of course I lose all I've entered.

Meanwhile, I am hoping that using the same PCI slot I took the OEM card out of will work magic...though the fact that it seems to be JUST the midi problem whispers to me that there is a setting somewhere that needs adjusted.

all best,
mgj