Hugh, thanks for not quitting on us! In my 31 years with MTU, we have NEVER experienced what we are now going through. We are months behind on new features as we struggle with the problems of Vista. :e :m

I hope you have installed 4.02. It fixes more reported problems. However, it is not perfect either. We had a long Engineering meeting yesterday and are embarking on a new direction. With all we now know, we can say that using Windows Media Player and IE together is NOT a good combination. The flashing, crashing, flckering, etc. you are experiencing, we can't get rid of. We have our most sophisticated programmer on this, and after at least a man-month of trying this, and that, and tuther, and other... we've exhausted all possible fixes for WMP+IE.

We're now taking a new direction today. It is CLEAR that our older Lyrics player was in sync with the audio, did not flicker, did not crash when Duration hit 00:00, and generally was as stable as the Rock of Gibraltar! The only problem was it couldn't handle Tempo SPEED UP more than about +8%. It went down to -52% without a glitch, but was too old-a-code (not based on DirectX) to go faster. Well, as the President, I made a "judgment call".

First, very, very few users have ever asked for Tempo change.
Second, NO ONE has ever asked for SPEED UP. Drunks and us older folks want to SLOW DOWN so we can see and respond to the slower music.

So, we are attempting to retain all the beautiful Show Display 4-screen features, Marquee, Singers Names Display, and Instabuttons, but are returning to the older tried and true "RW Render" we have that is rock solid. Our Beta Testers will get a chance to see it early next week (Lord willing). We must redo our core Show Display code... and we are doing it because like you, we want to regain stability. I can't sleep at night knowing my customers aren't using perfect code! :e :) :s

The "bods" are up to our eyeballs in Vista crap!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Microsoft is in trouble, IMHO. They should have never FORCED the world to use their "infantile" Vista. It is designed for computer newbies. After 9 man-months WASTED..... yes, WASTED.... we still don't know how to make its components work together. We finally found a way... about 5 dialog levels deep, to disable the Security while our program is running. There is NO OTHER WAY we could make anything happen in sync with their security crap. If they'd have fixed the core OS in the first place, like grc.com (Steve Gibson) and others forewarned them of, they wouldn't need to slaughter performance and multimedia. Corporate suicide if you ask me! :m :m :m

Hopefully next week we'll have our old code running again... and stable... with the new functions still there.

We have been working on Tempo since last November...on and off mind you. We were trying to bring it to you in 4.03, but alas, it is delayed again to solve these ongoing problems. If we have to return to our older code, then Tempo range will be -52% to +8%.... maybe; unknown until we are tested and shipping. :r :t :w

hoster 4.2
 

doh. still got the freezing with the egg timer guys. tried again to close down and re-open the software but no joy hangs again in minutes. thats the bad news,
goood news i love the insta buttons most of all i have installed a 30 second countdown where they have time to get back from the loo and then if not a flushing noise and screaming if they don't get back in time and move onto the next singer, wow does it go down well, happy birthday etc, fabulous,