i went back to a 2.2 kernel. one of the beauties of debian is that apt-get makes this so painless i just was not worth the trouble of fighting. i had hoped that they had gotten the bugs out of the 2.4 series(kernel of pain), but i guess not. anyway a quick(sorta) apt-get install-image-2.2.20 got me up(back) to a newer 2.2. fixed the old and new problems. sound is now working with just about everything but Xine. drive errors are gone. system is now stablized at 275,000ft :-) Thanks for all the help and suggestions, i tried almost all of them. -- Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of DOS, and danced the skies on Linux silvered wings. http://pfrostie.freeservers.com/cad-tastrafy/ //www.freelists.org/list/cad-linux