Hi Yep, that's the command that does it, just found it in my dectalk manual. I think the bug is with the dectalk, not speakup. I even dragged out an old dos bootdisk to see if the same problem (that of dectalk only accepting the negative number once) reared its head. Sure enough, it did. The best solution, IMHO, would be to use the dectalk's default [:pe 0]. This way there'd be no problem with reinitializing. The cost would be about a 1/10 second longer pause, however. The bug seems to be that dectalk doesn't really reset itself until it detects a bios reinit of its serial port. Apparently turning it off then on doesn't completely clear its flash rom. I'm not sure this can really be fixed unless someone knows how to modify the dectalk firmware. Don't know if this happens with the newer 4.61 firmware, but the voice inflections on that are so awful that it really isn't worth it, to my way of thinking. At 16:46 4/21/2003 -0400, you wrote: >AAAAAAARG!!!! I can't figure this out to save my life. There seems to be >a bug somewhere, but I can't track it down. I've looked at the source >code for the dectalk speakup driver, and it looks like the [:pe -300] >command is what gets rid of the punctuation delay. However, it only works >the first time the computer is booted. The same command is in the >reinitstring constant. However, if used after the computer is booted, >dectalk takes the -380 as positive instead of negative.