A cheery good morning, Mark,

(he said, bravely attempting to wave away the fumes of frustration).

The Geforce MX drivers are still supported. I have 56.16, for 2001. I had to scroll quite a bit to get to that one--I'm at the moment downloading 81.95.

Do you think I should just use add/remove to un-install and disable anti-virus to install the update? Or do the clean sweep of Audigy, also, and install both with all services disabled?

I've also re-enabled the unsupported device, having read that sound can be affected if any device is turned off. Some research revealed that this device--which I've wondered about--is for the Dell support button on the front of the case. I guess I'll follow the instructions for installing the XP driver. It was disabled when I upgraded from ME to XP.

You mentioned updating MIDI drivers. If that's possible, I might as well do that too. But I can't find any reference in Device Manager to MIDI other than in the Audigy properties under midi devices and instruments.

While on the subject of Device Manager, there is an entry, Legacy Audio Drivers, under Sound and Video Game Control. The properties for this one list Total Recorder under Audio Devices, Mixer Devices, and Creative WDM under Line Input Devices. I wonder if this could cause some kind of conflict but have been unable to find any way to make changes, other than check "do not map through this device". I've changed the settings in Total Recorder to use Audigy for all recording and playback, and MIDI playback offers only the same choices Composer does.

There are a few differences that came out of the five hours, or maybe six, I spent at it last night. Midi sometimes plays for a couple of minutes before the crash, and the tone that persists is more like a clarinet playing a bit above it's high G. Also, after about 20 minutes of playing a Wav file, I started to enlarge the media player on screen, and that crashed, too.

Any advice that might occur to you, I would be glad to hear. If I can stay awake, I'll switch PCI slots for the card and install the NVIDIA update (and Audigy, if that seems advisable) late this afternoon.

all best,
mgj