A little more information to add to the stew.

I have determined that my problem is temperature related. If my computer (the home PC, not the empeg) is warm, having been run for a few hours, the emplode program will fail every time. If I shut it off and let it cool down for an hour, emplode will load at least seven hours of music (that's the largest load I have tried). My best guess is that the USB is failing, causing the empeg to time out.

So, obviously a defective motherboard, right? Guess again. Replaced the motherboard (exact same model) and the behavior did not change.

I then brought the empeg and the software to work, where I have had 100% success running emplode.

This would seem to eliminate the empeg, the USB cable, the ac power brick and cable, and the emplode program as suspects.

So, I ask the question: Is anybody able to run emplode on an AMD K6-2 500Mhz computer with an Asus motherboard? Is it possible this could be some obscure socket-7 related problem, or more likely the ASUS implementation of USB just isn't sufficiently robust.

In a day or two I have made arrangements to borrow a USB hub, on the theory (hope?) that the hub will provide some buffering and keep the USB from falling over.

The guys@empeg have been helping me with this, and have offered me a modified emplode with additional error logging to see if we can track this down. I'll keep you informed.

tanstaafl.

"There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"