Frank, Tony,
Answering questions as they were posed:

1. The displayserver/empeg does not always require a cold boot, only sometimes. I'd put the failure percentages as spontaneous reconnect after a few minutes: 65%, emplode connects to empeg and displayserver starts again: 20%, cold boot required:15%.

I am not DEAD certain about the home/work thing. I do listen much more at work, but I ran it for about 45 minutes at home with no problem (I usually just listen to the source library on my hard drives).

Traffic & Topologies: Home traffic is virtually Nil. Home topology is two PC's. Mine is a dual home w/the cable modem (am running Black Ice but the internal adresses are excepted from its rules) and the empeg is on the 10/100 hub along with the PC's. Work topology is an unsegmented, unswitched LAN with two logical repeaters (god**n 3com stopped selling a superstack II that uplinked to the two I already had so I had to use the 100bT uplink port to a Linksys box). Network collision rates are low, there's about 12-15 pc's active at any time doing mostly database accesses. Network saturation usually less than 20%. The internet traffic is low as we've only got two lines from our T-1 for data. All the machines except the servers, printers & T1 router are DHCP clients and part of the Active Directory. There's two AD domain controllers.

My workstation does run Internet and Download filtering (McCaffee VirusScan latest version & DAT). I've turned these filters off with no change to the spontaneous quitting.

Both Winamp an Media player have the same behavior with displayserver.

I use empeg only with static IP's. When I move between my home and work I use the USB to change the IP address for the location I'm at. At work I've set the empeg to an address that's outside my DHCP scopes (I've got two DHCP servers-both W2K with non-overlapping scopes within the same subnet, cheap redundancy).

Another detail which may have no bearing whatsoever: my last incarnation of displayserver did not use the -noauth parameter, so I edited all my playists to be http://ttt:[email protected]/ so winamp could work (mediaplayer was smart enough to ask for the login, winamp just failed without this tweak).

All proxy settins for both winamp and WM were left at the defaults.

When I look at the system page in displayserver I see for or five threads for displayserver when I'm the only one using it. Is this correct? There also appears to be very little (~250k) free memory. I've got about 1.5GB left free on the empeg drive if that makes any difference.

Still baffled. A memory leak seems an interesting possibility as the severity of it could account for the three different failure modes, but I'm not a programmer.

I hope some of this might be helpful.

-Zeke

just say you weren't paying much attention...