Thanks, I'll look into that. Incidentally, I think I know what caused the problem in my case...I installed Dragon Naturally Speaking 9 Standard(from Nuance) the day before I noticed the Hal startup problem. The reason this occurred to me is that I had Hal TTS on my laptop as well, and when I installed Dragon on that a week later, the same effect on Hal occurred...I'm not willing to part with Dragon, so my investment in Hal seems kind of wasted.