Thanks Hood,
Missed steps are one demon we wanted to rid ourselves of. Our current software works well except for that little irritation that pops up just at the wrong time. When we first tested Mach we ran a 6 hour carving, watchdog enabled, with no known issues. We have had our share of surprises including purchasing pirated Mach and my first ever hard drive failure. Therefore, we have loaded the OS and Mach several times on two different HDs. In the end when it was time to clean things up and install everything in its proper place including moving the panel mount computer from the rats nest on the bench to the final panel we cleaned the HD and reloaded every thing one final time. Everything worked just fine.
The mystery to me is what has occurred that cannot be corrected by a fresh install of the complete system today. The only thing that has changed is we are using IT's disk to install XP, perhaps there is a difference with versions.
Is there a process to detect lost steps? That is, does Mach know if it was bumped by XP and log the event? It is seemingly working fine but missed steps, in my experience, are not easily detectable until I machine something expensive . . . XP seems to know when to mess it up.