I tested with Espeak as my software synthesizer, and espeakup driving it. There were no problems with hald. I then went back to the Dectalk, and the problem came back. Further, stopping hald after the fact didn't help. Even going into single-user mode didn't make Speakup respond normally. Only after disabling the startup script and rebooting did Speakup return to normal. Thus, I wonder if the problem is that hald is doing something on the serial port that the Dectalk isn't liking? I don't have any other serial synthesizers to test with. Also, I noticed that speakupconf doesn't work correctly. The command "speakupconf save" gives an error "cp: omitting directory `.'" Running speakupconf load, returns "cat: write error: Invalid argument."
