Hi, I'm deleting your long post. I very much doubt that your boot problem is related to your initrd, but you could look at /etc/initramfs-tools/modules. Instead, what's in your /etc/modules? You should see something like speakup_ltlk and a line that it's added by the Debian installer. What I would do is delete the speakup line from /etc/modules, move it to /etc/initramfs-tools/modules, rebuild your initrd and reboot. To rebuild your initrd, do: update-initramfs -u That should automatically rerun lilo as well. The advantage is that you get speech a lot earlier in the boot process. The disadvantage is that it makes no difference with software speech anyway. Note that doing it this way means you don't pass parms on the speakup module command line such as your synth name because the speakup_ltlk module pulls in speakup as a dependency. I personally don't use software speech so I can't comment on if you load multiple synth modules, such as one for software and one for hardware. I generally only use hardware speech because software speech eats so much memory and sounds bad to my ear by comparison.
