XP and the Empeg through USB are (for now) not a good combination.

True... I mentioned this problem to my son Kenneth (the one marketing the "Delta V" board game) who is much better versed in the complexities of computers and operating systems than I am, and here is what he said:

My experiences with USB stacks.

The USB stack as originally implemented in drivers for third party
stand-alone cards for Win95, then in Microsoft's initial Win95 and Win98
implementations, was a very loosely written stack -- it would accept as
valid inputs material that was "out of spec". This got tightened up with
Win98, which many early USB devices couldn't work with, and then loosened
again with Win 98 SE. The USB stack in WindowsME is nearly identical to
Win98 SE's. This backwards compatability impacted system stability -- many
BSODs are caused by the USB driver flaking out.

When I was beta testing BeOS and its USB stack, Be's USB driver was written
tight to the specifications, and reasonably well documented in what was
required of third party drivers, and many of the USB devices extant at the
point in time where BeOS app and driver development was being pushed by Be
were so far "out of spec" that they would work unreliably, if at all, and
tweaking the USB stack to be friendlier to "commonly used" devices was
something that the dev mailing lists had religious arguments over, with one
faction saying "No, do it RIGHT" and the other saying "Make my
scanner/gizmo/whatever work".

Windows 2000, due to security and stability issues, has a very rigorous USB
driver built into the OS. As a result, a lot of older USB devices just
don't work well with it. This was fine, so far as Microsoft was concerned;
Win2K is meant for office and professional use, where there are IT managers
who presumably do research before buying things to add to systems.

Rumor has it that the reason WinME came out is because they couldn't make
"sloppy" USB work well at all on Win2K. Win2K was supposed to be "NT for
Aunt Minnie", which took a little longer to get working in a satisfactory
manner, and was released as WinXP. So they did WinME as, effectively,
"Windows 98 with everything" as a stopgap product.

WinXP, because it's USB 2.0 compatable, has to have a tight USB driver.
Which means many devices won't work with it...and worse yet, many devices
will work with it if they were later production runs.

FYI, for any of you who run programming or traffic at radio stations, there
is a program called Tune Tracker for BeOS. Been out and about for 3 years
now, just put out version 2.

Caveat: Dane Scott (programmer of Tune Tracker) is someone that I've worked
with in the past, and is the guy who first showed me BeOS (on a Pentium 166)
running 20 movies at once while rendering an openGL teapot. The experience
with BeOS is "Ooh. Cute." Followed by "Oh. My. God." Followed by ranting
and wailing at the heavens at the incredible injustice of the world that
none of the big software companies ever ported their apps to it.

There are, alas, good programming reasons why no major companies ever ported
their software to BeOS. It's not just a different development environment,
but the entire OS and API is pervasively multithreaded. Most programs are
written single thread mode -- opening a simple UI window runs two threads in
BeOS. So most of your programmers have to learn something different and
unfamiliar, and when things break, they do it from race conditions, which
are maddening to debug.

Here's the URL for Tunetracker.

http://www.beosradio.com/tunetracker/


tanstaafl.