my empeg came with a 9pin/25pin adapter, but without a serial cable. I read about problems with some of the serial cables. Do I get a serial cable in the near future?

Yes. Rob decided it would be better to ship some empegs without serial cables than to ship them with the wrong serial cable, while the distributor pulled their head out of sorted out their problem. You should receive a replacement soon.

After power off/power on, the unit hangs during boot up most of the time(about 2 out of 3 tries), usually with only the empeg logo with tux onm the screen along with some minor harddisk activities.

If this happens only in the car, check out this thread and see if that's the issue.

If you can get this to happen using the indoor power supply, use this technique to see what the unit is telling you at bootup. Of course, you can't do this without the cable, so you'll have to wait for the cable before you can do it.

Some songs seem to crash the system, but I was unable to track them down yet (post mortem debugging is difficult when using a non-info-visual at the time of the crash).

If you can narrow it down to a particular song, analyze the song with MP3Trim's analysis features and see if there's anything wrong with its frames. Then send the song to Empeg as an example so they can make the decoder more robust on those kinds of errors.

Win98SE detects the empeg, searches for matching drivers (at least says so), and returns to normal operation. emplode however does not find the empeg, no matter which connection settings I use (USB only, USB+serial, USB+net or all). Any hints what this could be caused by?

That behavior would happen if you tried connecting the Empeg before installing Emplode. Is that what you did? If so, try de-installing and re-installing Emplode. If that works, please come back to this thread and report it as a working solution.

The display seems to have lines with brighter and lines with darker pixels. The difference in brightness is not big, but noticeable. Is this a known/frequent problem with empeg displays, or is it just my unit?

If you mean this, then yeah, that's normal.

___________
Tony Fabris