Hi Mark,

I believe I have got the villain to confess. But first, I decided to continue the .sfd/.not tests, but with MS Wavetable set in Control Panel as the default midi playback device, then set the programs to MS WT, then Sw Synth, then SB Synth A or B.

The .sfd test went as those before, i.e., eveything okay until the switch to SB Synth B. One little difference--after about 10 seconds of freeze, it started again, only to crash almost immediately.

The .not test went the same, to a point. MS WT and Sw Synth played fine, but the crash occured while I was switching to SB Synth A, while "Assign device to all staves" was showing. Nothing was playing.

I think the reason might have been that after the crash, Windows loaded without the file integrity scan, for some reason.

Memory usage was about the same as the earlier tests--36% - 49% physical RAM free.

At this point, I decided to try a RAM cleaner, so got "Clean Ram" from Nonags. Very simple to use--run it and it does a cleaning when physical RAM gets down to 4MB. It made little difference, and in fact the next crash occured while it was cleaning. This was after I had rebooted normally and had swtiched to SB Synth A in Composer and told it to clean now, although there was 110MB free.

Frustrated, I started a process of uninstalling each program that has anything to do with sound. I had done Nero's Media Player, with no difference. I didn't re-install it because I doubt I will ever use it. Then I did Total Recorder, with no change in the results when I played anything using SB Synth A or B.

THE REST OF THE STORY...
I went to Creative forums to try again to find someone with the same problem, but couldn't. While there I downloaded the user manual and read the section of soundfont bank management. The previous software had only a static soundfont cache, which I had set to something over 134MB, since I was using a bank that was 62MB--it wouldn't allow you to change banks unless you had more memory than the combination of the bank you were removing and the one you were replacing it with.

So I opened SBFM and found a dynamic cache of 12MB, with the 4MB default bank loaded. More on a whim than anything else, I upped the memory alloted to 45MB and made the cache static (which reverted to dynamic apparently, after I'd closed SBFM).

With this setup, when I played the same .not I'd been using, I could switch all staves to SB Synth A and play the whole file. With some pops, but not crash. I experimented with raising the soundfont cache and changing it to static again. Each time I raised it, physical memory available went down, but the sound quaility improved.

So, it would seem the eons of nightmare are over, though I haven't yet tried to play a midi file. It would appear that it DID have something to do with memory, only soundfont memory allocated. By extension I suppose more RAM would help a lot, too. I am getting angrier the more I think about it that Creative couldn't have created a pop-up telling one that the soundfont bank cache should be increased/decreased.

Hopefully, I can get rid of the pops in otherwise very good sound by playing with the soundfont cache memory. Hopefuly, too, I can play midi files without crashes now, though as long as I can play .not files and reinstall total recorder to record them, I can get along.

all best,
mgj