Hi Mark,

Let me bounce this off you . . .

The driver Creative's support guy directed me to is from 2003, somewhat later than the one on the installation disk, I think. The one I got off the web is dated just a month ago.

Could it be that the 2003 update corrects the problem with midi, that I had when I installed the card first, and that the correction is not included in last month's update; further that the 2003 update needs to be there for the current update to function properly, at least as regards midi?

Would this be a reasonable supposition?

For the moment, I have set the default for midi in control panel to Creative's Sw Synth--a very slight improvement over MS Wavetable. Who knows, after long enough, and if I go to no concert or listen to no CD, I might start thinking that the instrumental timbre is a better representation of the real ones and compose with the Sw Synth sounds in mind. (I don't usually laugh aloud when I'm all along, but I just did--had to.)

The fact that Acoustic support asked me to uninstall 3.3 and reinstall 3.2 as a fix for a problem others have reported, suggests that there is a problem with the card's software and IT is making my system sick. So I would guess a wipe and clean install of Windows might well not resolve the issue. Would that be a reasonable assumption?

(Lordie, with the Sw Synth the upper registers of the piano don't sound like MS Wavetable's xylophone. The sound isn't that of a piano, but at least it's an improvement. . . At least I'm listening to a midi file and it has not crashed the computer. Oddly enough, too, my computer is working faster again with that control panel change--at least, it seems odd to me that a change in default midi playback could do that.)

all best,
mgj