No, I don't believe I have that issue. I'm currently in the middle of a 6 hour synchronize operation, so i can't check out the config.ini file right now, but I definitely didn't touch the config.ini file after the reformat.

And I can sympathize with your concern about me changing things along the way. I've been a professional hardware and software troubleshooter for the past 8 years, starting with building and repairing custom PCs in the mid 90s, then to high end storage (fibre channel disk arrays), and quite a bit of networking and home theater installing in between. I am currently doing level 3 tech support for EMC storage products at Dell and spend most of my day walking people through processes to fix their systems. I think I have sound troubleshooting methodologies and understand very well the need to follow a script. In this case, I'm only interested in making it work, by any means necessary. I had actually put 30 or 40 albums on and it was working, then I went and changed player options in emplode, and started putting more albums on it. When I tried it again, it was suddenly failing, and i made the false assumption that it was the new music. After the music came off, and it still failed, I began to suspect the player options.

I'm guessing there's some process in the background related to the visuals, even if you aren't using any, so that every time you change songs, it's changing visuals (or refreshing the visual). is there some way to completely delete all visuals? i've never found any use for bright flashing lights visible out of the corner of my eye while i'm driving...

Thanks for all your help and i would appreciate it if someone could try to reproduce the issue. I'll report back when all my data is copied back over and I get the chance to test it.