Scott, I don't believe anyone answered your question about jiffy_delta. A jiffy as I understand it is like an interrupt generated by the kernel, kind of like the old dos timer interrupt. If you recall on a DOS machine you could lock up the system if you tried installing an interrupt handler that took too long to execute. On linux it is even worse, you can trash your file system because in the lock up process you run the risk of losing things like the super block! Now to answer your question, the jiffy_delta is found in /proc/speakup/your_synthesizer. In my case it is in /proc/speakup/doubletalk_pc, because I am running a doubletalk pc. Presumably, jiffy_delta controls how often speakup tries to insert itself in the running kernel measured in jiffies of course. Incidentally, in Redhat 8.0 they recently increased the speed of the kernel by an order of magnitude. This is of course more CPU intensive, but it improves the performance of realtime applications. Kirk, please correct me if I am wrong about jiffy_delta. Jim Wantz WB0TFK