HeatherHazeYAY!!! I finally got this working. Since this was a strange one, I thought I'd share the solution for posterity. Interestingly, it was a tech guru at Sweetwater who gave me the answer. But I still had to go through Cakewalk tech support to actually make the fix. It turns out there's a rare glitch that can cause the Windows registry to fail to update properly, causing the Fantom to not receive MIDI information. I have no idea what the cause is, but the solution is a simple registry tweak you can download from Cakewalk. Bingo! Problem fixed. But you have to go through tech support to get it. While diagnosing the problem, I also learned how to run the Fantom in hardware mode. I had done everything right, except for one thing: I didn't know you had to put the audio track in INPUT ECHO mode. Sheesh! So basically, you insert an audio track, set the input to Stero VS-700 FANTOM VS and set INPUT ECHO for that track on. Then you can run the synth from a MIDI track by selecting the MIDI output port as FANTOM VS (VS-700). If you've installed the Fantom VS Instrument Definitions for that port, you can select all the channels, banks and patches from the MIDI port. By the way, the Fantom ROCKS. So worth the trouble. :) I hope this helps somebody else down the line. This was a very tricky fix and I couldn't find a peep about it on the Internet. Maybe this will help. :) All the best, )-|-( Heather Haze