Brian, I got a response from another user a couple of days ago. Mike tells me he solved the same problem for himself when he disabled his sound card, and then re-enabled it, which fixed a memory allocation problem. Alas, it did not help me :-( MS and HP were both useless, as was JVC. I honestly believe this is a driver problem, and in spite of MS saying they are not to blame, well . . . that's nonsense; of course they are. Will you get a fix? I'm not optimistic