I wonder if there's something amiss.

It would seem so, but I am afraid I am way out of my depth here.

I just tested the fidsift.bat file on my player, and it ran in 9.7 seconds from the time I clicked on the shortcut to the batch file, to the closing of the DOS window. This is on a player with dual 80 GB drives and 16,438 fids.

A quick test to see if you really are properly fidsifted would be to add an album and re-synch. Your database rebuild time should be cut by about a factor of four, if my experience is anything to go by.

tanstaafl.