I had previously said I wasn't considering buying a Karma until the 40GB model came out, the price dropped, and a flurry of positive reviews rolled in. Well the 40GB is still a ways off, the price hasn't really dropped much, and the reviews have been, well, mixed.

However, I have a trip coming up next weekend during which I will be in airplanes for extended periods of time. I also have several Circuit City locations within easy distance, and it was a really nice day to drive around looking for a new toy. So, I bought one. I figure if it turns out to not be the player of my dreams, I've got 30 days to return it.

Well, so far, I can't comment on whether it's the player of my dreams, because I'm running into software install problems. I'm running Win2K SP4. At first the software wouldn't install, and I realized that it was trying to run "setup_wrapper.exe" which I guess fires off the other program installs. setup_wrapper.exe wasn't running properly, so I tried installing the 3 sub-programs (Update, Taxi, and RioMM) separately, which worked. However, when I fired up Music Manager, it gave me an error "Cannot initialise RICHEDIT20.DLL." Which makes sense, because "RICHEDIT20.DLL" doesn't appear on my system, but RICHED20.DLL does. I assume it means RICHED20.DLL and it's just a typo or something.

Anyway, I've had some other programs complain about this once or twice, so I figured I might have a corrupt DLL. The only thing I could think of trying was to delete RICHED20.DLL and re-install RioMM. Sure enough, RICHED20.DLL reappeared after installing RioMM, but I got the same error when I started it. So clearly, it's not the contents of the DLL itself that are causing problems, but some other esoteric problem that I'm sure I'll have difficulty locating.

So right now, I can't get RioMM running. I did flash the latest firmware, and I can listen to the sample tracks, but that's going to get old. I found RioMM Lite and that seems to be working well for now, but I was looking forward to testing out USB2.0 and utilizing the "real" Music Manager (no offense, Mike.) Do I have any recourse other than to reinstall Windows to clean up whatever corrupt DLL is messing things up? I really don't want to do that...

Anyway, I'll probably have more comments shortly... Still finding my way around this thing.

Greetings!

I also have Windows 2000 SP4 (Professional). I have riched20.dll as part of a windows uninstall, as part of the service pack files and in system32. I also have a riched32.dll as part of system32 and dllcache. I have no reference at all to a richedit20.dll anywhere searching my hard drives.

Quick and dirty troubleshooting tip - copy the file riched20.dll to richedit20.dll, and see if that clears up your RioMM problems. I will also post your message on the Karma Beta Board, to see if anyone else had that trouble.

Quick and dirty troubleshooting tip - copy the file riched20.dll to richedit20.dll, and see if that clears up your RioMM problems.

Been there, done that, no help. I'm assuming that because riched20.dll re-appeared after re-installing RioMM, that's the file it's talking about.

Thanks for posting to the beta board... Though my guess is "DLL Hell" isn't something they support.

Assuming RICHEDIT20.DLL is a typo, can you search your registry for it?

Hmmm! You said you installed the three programs, but did you install the driver set???

Other than in my Google toolbar's search history, no appearances of "richedit20." "riched20" appears in an important-looking part of the registry though (under the CLSID branch.)

Oh, I did the driver thing, but didn't mention it above. Thought it was implied though since otherwise I wouldn't have been able to apply the new firmware.

Valid point. Forgot about the firmware upgrade...

Hmmm...

How did the original Karma software install fail? Just curious. Have you tried removing the three individual components and retrying from the master install?

How did the original Karma software install fail? Just curious.

I put the Rio CD in, opened it, clicked "Install Rio Software" and nothing happened. I browsed through the CD to see the "install_wrapper.exe" that it's trying to call, opened that, and nothing happened. That's when I realized I wasn't going to get anywhere with the wrapper, and had to run the installs individually.

Have you tried removing the three individual components and retrying from the master install?

Yup, uninstalled them, downloaded the latest version, and tried running that, and it also died when running setup_wrapper.

Okay...

Let's try something different. Where is/are your copies of riched20.dll? Mine are:

riched20.dll - c:\winnt\$NtServicePackUninstall$ - 422KB - 7/22/2002
riched20.dll - c:\winnt\ServicePackFiles\i386 - 422KB - 6/19/2003
riched20.dll - c:\winnt\system32 - 422KB - 6/19/2003
riched32.dll - c:\winnt\system32 - 4KB - 12/7/1999
riched32.dll - c:\winnt\system32\dllcache - 4KB - 12/7/1999

Actually, you should not have had to run the installs individually. That implies that something big and bad is happening.

I've got the same ones you have except no riched32.dll and no riched20.dll in dllcache. Otherwise sizes, dates, and locations are the same on the other 3.

Yeah I know I wasn't *supposed* to have to run the progs individually, but when I hit a brick wall, I look for a door, or at least a way around the wall, instead of banging my head on it.

Valid point about trying to work around. It should have worked. But then, the main installer should have worked too...

Try copying the riched20.dll into that dllcache directory. I doubt it will help, but...

Do you want to try swapping out your riched20.dll for a different one?

Try copying the riched20.dll into that dllcache directory. I doubt it will help, but...

I don't *have* a dllcache directory, but I tried, and no dice.

Thanks for the suggestions, though. Hopefully someone in blue will have better ideas, otherwise, I see a long Windows reinstall in my future. Sigh.

Did you reboot (I know, asking the obvious...)?

A couple times, yeah. One of the Rio installations asked me to reboot and I did. Also rebooted at one point to install another program that uses riched20.dll just to see if that helped (which it didn't.)

Oh well, RMM Lite is doing the job for now... I think it has enough functionality for me to get acquainted with the Karma, but I'm not going to do my full sync until I get RMM working.

Understood. I think you will hear directly from Rob or Mike or someone here about the RMM Load. Given that it is the weekend and travelling and all, I do not know when they will reply. If I see anything on the beta board, I will let you know.

Understood. I think you will hear directly from Rob or Mike or someone here about the RMM Load. Given that it is the weekend and travelling and all, I do not know when they will reply. If I see anything on the beta board, I will let you know.

Yeah, I don't expect instantaneous response on a weekend... For now I'm doing okay with RMM Lite as a backup plan. Gives me plenty of time to focus on the player itself and decide if I like it long-term.

Wasn't there a known VIRUS which corrupted "riched20.dll" and/or placed additional infected versions of it on your hard drive? Anyone remember?

A quick google turned up this.

-Zeke

Yeah, W32.Nimda. I ran a scan and I don't have it or any other virus.

Did you have it in the past, cleaned it, and it damaged your copy of riched20.dll? If I recall correctly, the riched20 file was completely replaced by the virus and the only solution was to restore riched20 from the original installation CD. (Haven't read back in the thread to see if you re-installed riched20 from the CD or not.)

Did you have it in the past, cleaned it, and it damaged your copy of riched20.dll? If I recall correctly, the riched20 file was completely replaced by the virus and the only solution was to restore riched20 from the original installation CD. (Haven't read back in the thread to see if you re-installed riched20 from the CD or not.)

Never had Nimda. Going on 14 years without ever being infected with a virus or worm, actually.

Anyway as I mentioned earlier in the thread, I renamed the riched20.dll in my system32 directory and installed RMM, and the file reappeared, which means that RMM put its own copy (which obviously wouldn't be corrupted) there. Still no joy.

I'm very close to giving up and reinstalling Windows, I've pretty much tried everything.

Hmmm, maybe it's not riched20.dll that's the problem, maybe it's one of its sub-dependencies. Do you happen to have Visual Studio installed and can right-click and hit "view dependencies" on that DLL?

I have MSVC on here but it's left over from the last time I installed Windows, so the only thing that works on it are the command line utils (NMAKE, CL, etc) which is all I've used it for lately. But something tells me it probably depends on about a hundred different Windows DLL's so I'm not sure how far that'd get me anyway.

Okay, this is weird.

I did some more looking around, and when I delete riched20.dll, it automatically reappears after a few seconds. I used SysInternals "handle" program to try to figure out who's recreating it and it's the WINLOGON process. Now, I guess it's possible that Windows sits in the background and fixes this DLL if it gets deleted, but why this particular DLL? And where is it getting the original from if I'm deleting all copies in my c:\winnt directory? Does it just do an "undelete" in the background? I'm shift-deleting the file (not storing it in the recycle bin) so it'd have to be pretty clever about it.

I'm doing a full system virus scan now (before I ran a Nimda removal tool) to see if there's something fishy going on. So far it's found 59 viruses all in my email attachment directory (from a brief period of time when my email scanning was accidentally disabled) but none of them were actually executed. The virus scan is going to take a while... But this behavior seems different from any of the viruses I've seen that mention riched20.dll (they generally create many copies of it all over... This is specific to my Windows directory.)

Oh well, I don't have another Win2K box to test this on, so I dunno if it's normal behavior or not. On my Win98 box renaming riched20.dll means nothing, the file isn't getting auto-created. So either there's something about Win2K that does this automatically, or I have some kind of badness going on like a virus/worm that I haven't found yet.

Time to play some Solitaire while the virus scan completes...

I really, really prefer RMM-Lite (aka RMML) over RMM -- it suits my environment and the way I work much better. But it (1) lacks the 480mb/s USB2 support (which is about 6-8X the speed of the ethernet when loading tunes..), and (2) it cannot rip tracks.

Cheers

I would mock integrated rippers, if I hadn't configured iTunes to rip anything upon insertion and then eject. So I guess I should shut up.

I did some more looking around, and when I delete riched20.dll, it automatically reappears after a few seconds.

Windows File Protection is kicking in. To get Windows to even show the dllcache folder, you have to enable viewing of hidden and system files, and also enable viewing windows system files, both options are in the Folder Options dialog. (Sorry, not near a Windows box to find the exact text of these options).

Windows 2000 was the first Windows OS to really have this agressive restore, while 98 had System File Checker (sfc.exe) to detect problems manually.

Yeah, but I was deleting it from c:\winnt\system32 *and* c:\winnt\system32\dllcache at the same time. Plus whenever I've had Windows File Protection kick in, it shows a dialog like the one on that page. No such dialog is appearing now. I guess it could still be file protection, but it'd have to be pretty smart to restore even when I delete from both directories, right?

I'm *really* close to doing a reinstall. Probably about time for it anyway, I guess. Maybe I should think about upgrading to XP or 2K3 anyway.

Is there a commandline ripper that you use that I could call out to and just auto import the results?

As far as USB, I can't do it with pure Java, but if somebody exposes it as a serial driver, I can probably hook up to it with the java serial comm package.

Well, I spent a few hours today reinstalling Windows, and RMM is now installing properly. I dunno what was going on, but it's fixed now. I guess I was due for a reinstall anyway, my system was starting to drag a bit, and things are nice and snappy now.

Now to do some syncing and get a real feel for how this thing operates...

Willing to do a reinstall of Windows just so you can play with a toy (granted, you were due for one) shows some serious devotion to the empeg team!

Willing to do a reinstall of Windows just so you can play with a toy (granted, you were due for one) shows some serious devotion to the empeg team!

Heh. Nah, just devotion to something I paid $380 for.

Well, Windows should be reinstalled every 6 months anyway... Yes, I know, XP has made it much better, but I still get pretty bad bit rot over time...

Well, Windows should be reinstalled every 6 months anyway... Yes, I know, XP has made it much better, but I still get pretty bad bit rot over time...

My thoughts exactly. I'm at the point where I can get 90% of it done in about 3 hours. I have all my apps installed on a separate drive, and all my important files, etc. get backed up before the install. So I basically format the C: drive during installation, and do my major software installs en masse. Then the utils and apps I don't use that often will get installed the next time I need 'em. In the mean time, my PC sure is a lot faster.

You can save quite a lot of time by slipstreaming the service packs during installation, if you're going to be doing it regularly.

See this or this for Windows 2000, or this for Windows XP.

I also found this, which supposedly tells you how to do the same for Office XP.

Hm, cool. Yeah I reinstall about every 4-6 months just to keep things fresh. I'll have to give those a shot and make some integrated CD's. Saves the constant rebooting after WindowsUpdate does its thing.