thank you, and i'm the same with cars. i can take a $50 repair, try and do it myself than have to bring (tow) the car to a mechanic to find out i ****ed things up so much it's now going to cost $300. that said, what is an "image backup"? i have a 1T external hard drive. is that something i will need?

@ don, i really needed to laugh, thanks so much. i had a feeling TU was that. i do know enough that never, ever touch anything with DLL. it's like sticking ones hand into a 3 phase 800 amp service panel for a 20 story building. after a bright flash, (think Hiroshima) someone comes in and sweeps whats left with a broom.

joey90405
what is an "image backup"? i have a 1T external hard drive. is that something i will need?

An image backup is a backup file that is basically a snapshot of the drive you have backed up.  Having an image backup is handy if you ever have to restore your drive to a previous state.  It also saves you from having to reinstall and configure your Windows operating system and your sonar configuration as the image would contain all of this. 

I use a file based nightly backup, a weekly file based backup of the Windows operating system and the program files and an image of the system drive nightly.  This weekly file based backup does not include the user data itself.

This has got me out of the proverbial on many occasions.

Personally, you might want to get an IT professional to configure this all for you just to confirm the integrity of the backups and to show you how to do a restore if you need to.   (Mind you, you would probably call said person to do the restore)

hey man, thanks so much. i've had to do a clean install on another machine and it was a 3 day process reloading everything like sonar and toontrack etc. a total nightmare. i have a full-service account with those geek squad people. one interesting thing. i looked online for that string of numbers and someone said the problem could be, either the HD is going TU or it's the graphics software. so last night i updated that and it was the first time i ever did an update that actually needed an update. this error only shows up when i open sonar. we'll see.
thanks again.