When I plug my serial cable inand power the player on it just keeps rebooting - I catch a glimpse of "Ignoring Emergency persist data" on the front panel before it goes back to Hijack245...

This isn't my original Rio serial cable and I don't know that it's wired right... I'll look for another. In the meantime...

Does the player keep rebooting only when this questionable serial cable is plugged in?

If so, you could try disconnecting certain wires. The empeg uses only pins 2, 3, and 5.

Pin 5 is ground, pins 2 and 3 are receive and transmit. Swap 2 and 3 back and forth until it works. (One way is crossover or nullmodem, the other way is straight through.)

More details here.

Yes

Thanks - I dug around and found another cable that doesn't cause the reboots and works fine with Emplode --- but doesn't work with Jemplode

Any ideas on that anyone? I read the Jemplode FAQ (I'm using XP on this box).

I copied the jre dlls etc into the corresponding locations in the jdk's jre structure but no joy (although it took longer to say no devices so I assume that before I did this it couldn't find the dlls etc)

I've tried Jemplode 35 (that I was using before) replaced the jar with jemplode20.jar from v45 and now done an install of v46 - no joy.