XXHighEnd

In case it helps development here are a couple of things that happened during my listening sessions

I tried to create a play list and this seemed to overload the software. The playlist box was filled with a big red X and the whole thing crashed out. After this XX would not launch properly. The tab was at the bottom of the page but no matter how many times I pressed it, it would not expand to fill the screen. I had to clean all the associated software off the PC and reload before I fixed it. I don't play around much now. :whistle:

On one occasion the music was just a series of rapid ticks - I have now learnt this is due to running with too small a buffer in the Fireface.

After leaving the system on, but not playing, for about an hour while I watched my favourite TV program I put in a list of about 6 tracks and sat down to enjoy. Superimposed on the music were a series of infrequent but annoying scratching sounds. I wiggled all the cables (as you do) but it was only cured by rebooting the PC. No idea what it was :grazy:

Thank you for this information Chris.

The read cross can happen, and currently I am not sure what it exactly need to let it do that. I had it myself for three or four times.

When you start XX and it is minimized to the taskbar, this usually is the result from minimizing XX and then close it (rightclick on the icon and X). Now, since the player remembers its location and size, it redoes that at the next startup. And there you go ...
I really must fix that, because its very inconvenient (though rather standard Windows behaviour). I think I can fix that anyway.

In the end it is sure not needed to do as you did : reinstall so many things;
The unobvious thing to do is maximize XX (rightclick - Maximize), followed by "redo previous size" (which just would be clicking the square box in between the minus and the X at the right top of the form), followed by dragging the form to a convenient position.

The rapid ticks as you described are, as far as my experience goes, due to Fireface anomalies. It can't have all the stuff fed we feed it with, and sometimes it goes bananas of it. Not that far more dangerous is the situation that just no sound comes from it, so you don't get on the path of switching it off and on. But that too can happen.
What remains is what caused it in your situation, and which well can be a derived situation from you leaving the player sit for 60 minutes, while before that it should have timed out because of the demo version. However, I did not explicitly anticipate on it quitting from the situation it's not playing anything, while you incurred for that. I will look into it.

Maybe superfluosly : never start to get back to restore points because of something you think was caused by XX. It just cannot, and I never experienced it. It can look like it though, but then better try to ask the question here first, in order to save you all the troubles.

Thanks again,
Peter