Hi Mark and Sherry,

Thanks, Sherry, that's another place to look. I sincerely hope it's not more physical ram I need since 1. I have more than Creative requires. Probably the recommended amount, since it's twice the required figure. 2. For about twice what Dell wants to bring it up to 512MB (over $300), I could get a whole computer with that much, twice my HD size, a faster processor, and a flat panel display.

Mark, not only, as I described above, was everything working fine last night, except for the pops, but I had plenty of memory to do other things--a browser and mail program were open. I went on to do some editing in Composer, and things were working faster there. Don't know what that means, unfortunately.

I'm back to square one, now, with instant crashes. The only thing I did was try to load Acoustica (and somewhat enhanced Audacity). It was working fine before all this. But I got a message that it had to close with a Close and a Debug button and place to click to see what the error report would include. I tried all three. Nothing worked, so I un-installed and re-installed. Got the reg key entry page, entered it and it tried to load. The splash screen was behind the must close message. Oh, and error reporting somehow got disabled--a passing cosmic ray, no doubt. I set it on manual because I've never had to set it before, and thought I'd try that first. Grrrr.

Tried playing the same things I had played before, and crash, crash, crash. Uninstalled Acoustica, but crash, crash, crash.

SBFM was left as I had set it.

The computer is still responding faster than ever.

Perhaps SBFM memeory allocation was just another sympton?

all best,
mgj