Hi Mark,

It's been a long night, day and night again. You may have been right a bout "soundfonts" being involved, if you mean any bank other than what is there when you open SFBM for the first time. I began to get crashes again after loading a bank with quite a number of instruments I like better than GM ones. It is about 29MB. It did not matter what I set the SBFM memory allocation to, anywhere from 45MB to 175MB, the upper limit.

Worse, I re-loaded the default bank. At least, since when I clicked on replace to load the 28MB bank, I was in Win Sys32/Drivers. So I loaded the 4MB bank I found there. It made no difference. Whatever I did with memory allocation, I got a crash, with .not, with midi, with mp3, with wav files, in whatever program I used to play them.

I decided that I would uninstall and reinstall again. For a reason I still don't kow, however, the procedure didn't work this time, possibly because Creative Media Source wasn't in add/remove? Or maybe because I was too punchy and did something out of order. Anyhow, I got into a situation where the uninstaller would get to 58% then tell me that some "subscribers could not be invoked" and that the process would terminate and close. I cleaned the registry after deleting the relevant directories by hand. No the installer gave me not complete install option and when I tried repair or modify, I was informed of those shadowy "subscribers" again. (What kinds of idiots think such undefined terms are going to make any sense to the average user?)

To make a very long story short, I finally seem to have got what I needed zapped, using a program called Windows Uninstall Cleaner, which came from I have no idea where, to get rid of Media Source and SB Audigy, which I had installed from the web driver update, and the WDM drivers, for which there is a separate install/uninstall program on the Creative installation disk.

I still couldn't use this disk to install, but I apparently got enough on there to be able to install the mixer, graphic eq, eax, etc., etc., by going to their directories and using the setup.exe I found in each.
This was after installing the Windows Driver web update. Last, I got and installed everything on the auto-update page. I figured that perhaps the more I had on there, the more chance I could get everything uninstalled, yet leaving those "subscribers" lurking somewhere in a Windows sub-directory or the registry, or wherever they ply their trade. Due to a mistaken click, I have older drivers (from the installation CD) there were on the machine before, unless they were included with the web update.

Ready to zap everything and get the old and unsatisfactory, but non-crashng card back in place, I gave it one last fling--I had to set enable the services and restart, anyhow.

I have restarted since then, but I have also been playing wav, mp3 files, a CD of the "Archduke" Trio, the midi file of the "Chrismas" Symphony (of which I recorded as I played it, the 4th movement). I have done nothing in SFBM, other than set the memory allocation to 30MB, leaving dynamic cache as the option.

I do have noise--like static, with usually wide, ir-regular spaces between the pops. I am a little afraid of playing with SFBM. Who wants another nightmare so soon after waking up? And I'm very much afraid to trying any soundfonts other than those there now, even if so far, I have been able to play anything, including midi files, with Thunderbird open and of course this browser. I will wait until doing anything more until I get the next response from Creative.

I sure hope nobody else has anything like this, and am surprised that I couldn't find anything described in exactly the same way on the Creative forum. Most people, though, might simply write their tech support, as I did. It will be very interesting to hear what they have to say this time.

best,
mgj