Hi Mark, Sherry,

To keep this chronicle up to date--

The Creative techie who answered this time said to delete the entire Creative directory as long as I have no other Creative products, before installing the 2003 HD EAX driver.

Interestingly, this step IS part of a process, which this techie detailed further. The next steps include, going into setup and disabling the onboard sound chipset, checking for sharing of IRQ numbers (SB does share 11 with the Linksys ethernet network card and Intel(r) 82801BA/BAM USB Universal Host Controller), and running a Creative system diagonist tool and sending the results as a text file.

It strikes me that the further steps might be those that should be performed first, but I will do things in the order specified, I guess. I am going to do a test now, however: I am going to temporarily diable the network and see if that helps.

best,
mgj