HI Sherry,
Thanks for the tips. I'm about 90% there. I think disabling all the programs in the tool bar did the trick. There are still a lot of programs running that don't have icons in the tray I should shut down, and I think I need to experiment a little with the volume settings, but I can record now. When I try some vocals, I won't need to run Composer in the background, so that will eliminate another running program. That ought to be fun. I'll lay down the tracks in Composer and edit them, convert them to MP3 in Synthfont so I'll be able to hear the tracks in Audacity. Phew!
Fred