Hey Rich, > Thanks for that, but since I haven't a scooby what's causing the problems, > I'm > not going to waste both of our times by trying to figure out what's going on > here. Instead, I've finally bitten the bullet and ordered an AMD64 CPU & mobo > (a cheap and cheerful socket 754 system, but what the hell). I run a socket 754 Athlon64 3000+ on an Asus K8N-E Deluxe (nForce3 250Gb) motherboard. It's a quick system (compared to Athlon XPs), and in 64bit mode, some things just fly (like ogg vorbis encoding at quality 8, 256kbit .. about 18-20x realtime for 16bit 44kHz WAVs :D, 32bit oggenc gets about 11-13x). Good luck with your new AMD64 setup when it arrives. Linux 2.6.8.x has issues with nForce3 SATA, so be weary (I think only Debian uses that kernel, every other distro uses a newer one for AMD64, including Ubuntu). Cheers, Lem