Final remark: didn't someone suggest that it wasn't emplode that ran out-of-memory, but the player itself??

Hmmm.... I'm beginning to wonder if we are all looking at the wrong end of the link. Henno, didn't you mention recently that you were running to the end of your available disk space on the empeg?

Could we be seeing the result of a lack of swap/track storage space on the empeg, causing some failure at the empeg end (eg, the player can't rebuild a music database because of lack of space, thrashes trying to free something up. times out??), which then gives back a "completed I/O" response at the emplode end, which is either incorrectly reported or not reported at all?

It seems there has been a rash of people reporting this recently - I wonder if it's beacuse people are only now starting to completely fill their empeg disks, and it is tickling a number of bugs at both ends of the link?