Make sure all of your songs are in playlists. At the moment, you can only shuffle all the songs on the player if they are all in playlists. If the songs are in the soup view but not in a playlist, you can only do searches to locate them.

Once your songs are all in playlists, press the down button on the front panel three times to play the entire player contents.

Jemplode is a Java-based alternative to Emplode. Its primary advantage is that it can run on any brand of computer, for instance, Macintosh.

And yes, there are bugs when using USB on Windows XP. Hopefully they will find a fix for this in time for the next software release. The work around, for now, is to use ethernet instead of USB (or use a better operating system, I think XP is a piece of junk). If it's any comfort, I've heard that there are lots of hardware devices whose USB drivers don't work right on XP. Supposedly Microsoft rewrote the USB software for XP. Guess they didn't do to good of a job.