And after installing my stuff and rebooting the player, you can run Emplode and all your songs are still there, both drives' worth?

Yup, yup and yup.

Emplode reports 2985 of 25774 MB available (gotta start thinking about upgrading...)
just as before (10+18G disk), emplode sees songs I know are on hda as
well as hdc in emplode and on the player I still get all 5540 songs in
the 'global' playlist.

No problems at all, after I upped the picker time-out...

/Michael