Hey guys, any help you can provide me with this problem would be greatly appreciated. Over the course of today, my player seems to have taken a major turn for the worse. First I'll just tell you the current symptoms:

1) The display is fairly distorted. By distored, I mean the display image is visibly flickering, and there is a duplicate of the normal display image vertically offset about 2/3 the way down the display (only the top of the duplicate is visible).

2) The player now turns itself off right after booting (even the standby LED turns off). It won't turn on or respond to the front panel after booting, but it does still respond to the ethernet interface (Emplode sees it and is able to apply upgrades even when in this state).

After trying a number of things, I have only been able to get the EMPEG to boot up and play music once since this happened, and that was right after a software upgrade. I tried the upgrade again, but the results weren't repeatable.....

Here's the sequence of events that led up to this condition:

This morning, I used my car to run some errands and the EMPEG was working great like usual. It has been docked in the car for over a week since I haven't had any new music to sync and was happy with the rev of Hijack I was using.

I went home and left the car parked for a few hours.... went back out to the car to run to the store. I start up the car, and the EMPEG goes through the regular boot sequence and starts playing. Everything seems fine, except I have no audio output at all.... amp is on, but silence from the EMPEG. I try different tracks, adjust the volume, still no audio.

I reseat the player to see if maybe something was not seated correctly.

This time, while it is rebooting the display looks distorted.... and the player locks up before completing the boot process (I think it said 'starting server' or something similar).

I reseat it again, and it fully boots... but as soon as the boot cycle is complete the display turns off (and the standby LED is not flashing). No audio either... I try to blindy navigate the menu buttons to see if maybe it is working sans display, but cannot get any sound out of it or any feedback from the display or LED.

I try cycling the ignition and reseating it a few more times, same results... it boots and then seems to shut off.

I bring it inside, and connect to hyperterminal, the results are attached. And I learn that it behaves the same way on AC power.

Then, I reload 1.03 consumer, and the player seemed to work again on the first reboot (the corrupted display problem remains, but I could get music out of it, navigate the menus, etc). However, subsequent attempts to reboot after this result in the original problem (player shuts itself off, no standby LED).

Any ideas? Is my player toast? I will probably contact support as well, but since my warranty expired about 4 months ago I don't expect they will be able to do much. I have a feeling something important on the mainboard may have died. Luckily I bought a shelf spare when RioCar had their clearance, but I wasn't planning on having to put it into primary duty so soon.

I had a problem in the past where the player would restart itself every 1-3 hours. I posted the serial output on this forum, and got a response from mlord that indicated my player was "running out of memory, either due to a leak in the player, or just bad memory management fragmentation) by the player. " Perhaps that was an early warning sign of some sort.... especially since no one else responded to that thread with the same problem?

Since I posted that rebooting problem, I haven't experienced it again. But I attributed that to the fact that I really haven't driven the car more than an hour at a time since then... it usually occurs once every 1-3 hours of continuous operation.