EAC ripping but not using LAME to encode

I asked this question over at the EAC forum, but didn't make much progress. Hopefully someone here can help me out...

I was previously running EAC with Lame in Win2000 Pro with no problems (alit preset extreme setting). I recently installed WinXP Pro and am now having a bit of a glitch. Well, more than a bit really. I'm sure it's something simple, so I hope someone here can help. I went through and setup EAC and latest version of LAME like I had it set up before (or at least I think I did) but for some reason, when I "Select and Copy Tracks>compressed", the tracks are only extracted as wav filesbut not oconverted to mp3 files like they were before. In other words, it doesn't look like the lame.exe ever starts up.

Any ideas on what might be the problem? All my hardware is the same as before when I didn't have any troubles. Thanks in advance.

A good starting point for checking your configuration is to follow Chris Myden's setup guide at http://www.chrismyden.com/nuke/modules.php?op=modload&name=MP3DB&file=painless

Actually, that's what I did to first set it up. But it's not working.

Are the WAV files about 1 MB per minute or about 10 MB per minute? If it's the former, it's actually embedding MP3s within the WAV format. If it's the latter, it's actually creating WAVs. This information could help narrow down where the problem lies.

they are about 10 MB per minute

In other words, it doesn't look like the lame.exe ever starts up

EAC spawns a CMD window (AKA DOS box!) with Lame running in it. If this indeed happened correctly you would certainly notice it, unless your taskbar is set to auto-hide and the CMD window was hidden behind something.
In all probability Lame never executes or if it does it's bombing straight away.
You should test Lame isn't corrupt: Open a CMD window where Lame lives and run it without parameters, you should get a screen of text with version no. and usage parameters.

I have just tried to fool EAC about where Lame lives and it returns "Wrong path or program!" - try doing the same as a sanity check.

Why not just hit the "Mp3" button?

Same problem. Lame won't start.