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.

Well, interesting thread anyway, but the problem also occures with the factory (i.e. the onw supplied by empeg) power supply.

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.

Right. I will try to find a null modem cable somewhere in my huge pile of computer cables. Might be worth a try. However that has to wait until I leave hospital.

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.

No, that´s not what I did. I originally used the network transfer method, as my home network has quite enough IPs (officially routed, 6 usable IPs for 3 computers+empeg+printserver, of course behind a firewall) and dynamic address allocation (all but one computer do get their IPs via bootp/dhcp). So emplode was installed way (um, ok, 1 day) before I connected the empeg via USB.

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.

Well, yes, that´s what I ment. I mean it is not tooo bad, but it somehow disturbs my high quality impression of my MK-II. But I think I can live with that.

cu,
sven