As a new guy to Empeg I would like to offer that some of the FAQ's are more "enthusiast" oriented. Some use the "Empeg Lingo" and a search for "cannot retrieve player information" or "hangs on retrieving player information" do not result in anything.
I had a problem with increasing sync times and did a search, on slow sync times and retrieving player information (where the player was hanging). I didn't find anything so I asked a question. Tony was nice enough to point me to the FAQ item that helped and I felt kinda dumb for not finding it when I read the heading which was "My config.ini file went all goofy on me, and I can't edit my favorite visuals any more!" which eventually pointed me to the problem, but did not mention slow sync times. (see thread) .

I did not know about config files or shell scripts until I had this problem and as you can see from the thread I ended up resolving the issue in a different manner (still not completely sure what I did but things are normal now) and as a bonus learned more about empeg than I almost cared to.

Now there's a thread with "Slow sync times" (my original issue) that will help someone else out (hopefully).

I really love the empeg and find this BBS one of the best at trading information, thanks for the patience, all of you experienced users and programmers out there. I promise to try the FAQ's but sometimes I don't really know what the real problem is