SUCCESS! I owe you guys BIG TIME. what I did was to dump the entire Reaper file that was in Applications support, in case other things were corrupt. I realize I now have to reset my ENTIRE setup, but that will be time well spent, if the earlier problems go away. (that's a big if) THANKS - more than I can say. ======================================= This raises an obvious question: Why doesn't this folder go away when you de-install Reaper? there should be a "clean uninstall" option.

No doubt. I always do, but the problems I've had just come out of the blue most of the time. Anyway, THERE IS STILL A PROBLEM: As I wrote, I dumped the whole Reaper folder, just to be safe. I just went to look at the new folder, and THERE IS STILL NO REAPER.INI FILE in applications data. It DOES NOT exist. There is a "main" Reaper configuration file (the only one without an aditional qualifier in the name) and that is the one that, if dumped, lets me launch the application. Is THIS the ini file, just not named the way you guys are saying? If so, should I be worried about this? Should I be worried that my "applicaton data" folder is not where you guys say it should be? (and that "search" doesn't find it? Cconsidering the massive problems I've been having....

Can you show us a screen dump of your "dumped" Reaper folder?

It's gone. Also, I don't know how to do a screenshot on a PC. (I'm mostly a Mac guy) Trust me, there's no REAPER.ini file in the Applications Data folder.

Have you tried a Start Menu search for reaper.ini since getting it to work again? Reaper has to be writing that file somewhere, no two ways about it.

Did you try what I suggested in post #20? That should recreate the REAPER.ini file: If you still can't find it you can try (from Windows Start menu) Start -> All Programs -> REAPER -> Reaper (reset config to factory defaults). But I simply cannot believe it has gone. You thought that before and it was there somewhere. It must be there.

Maybe he has "Hide extension for known file types" checked and only sees a file called reaper instead of reaper.ini. Karbo

Double Click on My Computer. Click on Tools > Folder Options... in the menus. Click on the View tab. Remove the check from Hide extensions for known file types. Click the OK button.

I sincerely hope your problems have gone away Cableaddict and you are on your feet again. This once again proves that this board is one of the best out there. Many very knowledgeable, patient people prepared to help. :) This got me thinking and this is in no way directed at Cableaddict. I think the time has come where we must face facts - recording of music on a DAW means you need to be fairly adept at fixing your PC and troubleshooting. Back in the old days, audio engineers had to be handy with electronics as well as knowing where to put a mic. This level of ability has been lost in the sands of time. I run an IT support consulting company and I love it when people don't know their PC's ($$$) but the time of the Luddite is coming to an end. You just have to 'know computers'. Maybe it's easy for me (and many others on this forum) to say this because rebuilding a PC is all in a days work and images of stable systems are on all my computers, but it really is a sign of the times. My advice to all concerned about their DAW becoming useless - make a separate partition on your hard drive, get it stable and download DriveImageXML. Make an image and worry not.

I'd have a check in the Event Viewer for disk errors. In my experience as an IT tech random problems like this can be sometimes be attributed to an imminent disk failure. Go to Start -> Run and type Eventvwr and hit OK. Select the system log and have a check through.