I am using XP-SP1. Once MSN Messenger is installed, it requires test of the speakers. When I go through the process, the system freezes completely. I tried Live Messenger first and, instead of freezing, it would automatically reboot the whole system. Would this have to do with the sound card (which is actually built-in) ? Everything else works all right. I wouldn't like to switch to xp-sp2 if I could avoid it.

might be a problem with the sound card. do you have problems with other applications? Try updating and/or re-install your sound card drivers. It sounds like you're getting a blue screen error, and it's automaticly re-booting, follw the directions here: http://www.tunexp.com/tips/maintain... let us know what the error says. -- Why are you afraid of SP2?

The sound card works fine with other applications. There is no blue screen. With MSN Messenger, the whole system freezes as soon as you click on the button to start the test on the speakers. With Live Messenger, the screen becomes black at exactly the same stage in the process and the re-boot is automatic. There is no error message in either case. Wouldn't you expect a software which reaches a version of 7.5 or 8.5 to provide an error message when something goes wrong? I don't like moving to an upgrade when everything else runs fine, especially when Microsoft is involved and DirectX 9.0c is installed. How come other applications using the sound card run fine? He plays videos and clips with PowerDVD and Media Player Classic, for example. The situation described here is on the pc of a non-technical user. Switching to xp-sp2 will very probably create new problems and not necessarily solve the problem. I don't want to lose my credibility. Telling the user that Microsft products are often crappy is not a solution.

I was deleting some threads that I was tracking and saw this one again. The only other ting I can think of, is it might be a .Net problem. Do you have .Net installed? I don't use MSN/Live messenger so I have no idea if it needs .Net, but it's likely. If that dosn't work I'm out of ideas.

Sorry for the delay but it is only recently that I managed to lay my hands again on this pc. We went for XP-SP2 and, as expected, new problems popped up. The bottom line now is that MSN Messenger works properly except for sound. The person we call can hear us fine but his voice is garbled. When we play a DVD movie on the pc, sound is also garbled. On the other hand, a music cd plays fine (over same player). And when there is sound on PowerPoint (PPS) documents, sound is also okay. We tried to update the sound device firmware WebDrvsV5_12_01 from the Sound Blaster site and we got an error message telling us we had no Sound Blaster device (!!!) although it's a Creative SB PCI 128 (Ensoniq ES 5880).