Mr. Barber, It kind of seems that everyone (myself included) was distracted from the original subject that you posted. Anyway, on the CCRMA website it does say that some machines won't be able to run the "ll" kernel. As I said before, I just stumbled upon the fact that while my athlon won't run the "ll" athlon kernel (I had the same lockups you describe) it will run the "ll" i686 kernel. I don't have any idea what this does to system performance as far as music production goes, since my limited amount of music recording experience is on Windows and Cubase, and my boss won't even entertain the thought of using Linux, or at least giving it a try. So I don't have anyway of testing the i686 kernel with the athlon in a realworld situation. Rick B