Hi,
Perhaps the conclusion has finally been reached. Fed Ex arrived and I installed. There was a defect in the card it appears; I played a whole symphonic movement using with Synth A set as the default and the computer didn't crash. I flashed the BIOS, anyhow, since it was an upgrade specifically for my model Dell that shipped after XP Sp2 and had an Audigy card installed.

The only glitch was a muffling in the strings (patch 49 in Composer), but that turned out to be the Musica Theoria strings, which sounded OK with the old card. Other strings work all right.

Hopefully, now I can stop thinking about setup instead of music.

all best,
mgj