How do you know it's always in the same spot?

I only know that other than loosing the playlists (which I believe was a result of my troubleshooting) I would always get the same errors in hyperterm. I would think that would be from bad file/s either from corruption or bad sectors on the disk.

...you need to press the Enter key in Hyperterminal at the right moment to make it work its magic.

Thank you Tony, that was exactly the "magic" I was looking for. It would have been nice to have at least a readme on empeg's site giving you some basic instructions though. I ran the stress test all night and put the developer image back on and it synced fine with empload before I left for work. I can't wait to get back home and load all my music back on.

Thank you for everyone's help.