thanks for the tip,

when i went to the UPS tab in the power settings it said that the UPS is currently stopped..bummer

i don't feel that is is the physical port - i ran all the tests from the sytem config (baud test, etc) and they all passed.

i am going to test my player on a friends machine tonight and see if it might be my cable

thanks again for all of your help
this has been a very frustrating few days but luckily i loaded 5324 songs on the player before the problems began. that should be enough to keep me busy until i figure this darn com port issue out