I had previously said I wasn't considering buying a Karma until the 40GB model came out, the price dropped, and a flurry of positive reviews rolled in. Well the 40GB is still a ways off, the price hasn't really dropped much, and the reviews have been, well, mixed.

However, I have a trip coming up next weekend during which I will be in airplanes for extended periods of time. I also have several Circuit City locations within easy distance, and it was a really nice day to drive around looking for a new toy. So, I bought one. I figure if it turns out to not be the player of my dreams, I've got 30 days to return it.

Well, so far, I can't comment on whether it's the player of my dreams, because I'm running into software install problems. I'm running Win2K SP4. At first the software wouldn't install, and I realized that it was trying to run "setup_wrapper.exe" which I guess fires off the other program installs. setup_wrapper.exe wasn't running properly, so I tried installing the 3 sub-programs (Update, Taxi, and RioMM) separately, which worked. However, when I fired up Music Manager, it gave me an error "Cannot initialise RICHEDIT20.DLL." Which makes sense, because "RICHEDIT20.DLL" doesn't appear on my system, but RICHED20.DLL does. I assume it means RICHED20.DLL and it's just a typo or something.

Anyway, I've had some other programs complain about this once or twice, so I figured I might have a corrupt DLL. The only thing I could think of trying was to delete RICHED20.DLL and re-install RioMM. Sure enough, RICHED20.DLL reappeared after installing RioMM, but I got the same error when I started it. So clearly, it's not the contents of the DLL itself that are causing problems, but some other esoteric problem that I'm sure I'll have difficulty locating.

So right now, I can't get RioMM running. I did flash the latest firmware, and I can listen to the sample tracks, but that's going to get old. I found RioMM Lite and that seems to be working well for now, but I was looking forward to testing out USB2.0 and utilizing the "real" Music Manager (no offense, Mike.) Do I have any recourse other than to reinstall Windows to clean up whatever corrupt DLL is messing things up? I really don't want to do that...

Anyway, I'll probably have more comments shortly... Still finding my way around this thing.