I am running Mach3 with a smooth stepper on an old Dell Latitude Computer using XP. I am trying to do some 3d milling. When milling a piece of code that is short I do not seem to have problems. But on longer programs used for 3d milling it just stops with the "ran out of data" message.

I have run the special driver program, I have updated my computer to have 4 gig. of ram.

I don't think it is a windows interupt issue because it stops at the same line of code everytime,  Line number #238226. I have the look ahead set to 225.

Clueless where to look

You need to upgrade to the latest Ethernet SmoothStepper plug-in and make sure your Mach 3 version is 3.043.058 or higher. I recommend version .062 though. There was an oddity with how Mach 3 was filling the move buffer in some cases which could result in both Mach and the plug-in waiting on each other. This issue was fixed in Mach 3 .058 and the latest ESS plug-in.

I am running 3.043.066 and ESS V10r2d1, still having the same problems, do I need to go back to 062?

Try turning off  the toolpath view and see if that helps, you will find the button just above the Reset on the Diagnostics page.

Hood

Okay I turned the tool display off, I traded computers, I added memory, I rebooted the computer between each little run, still the &*!*( stops randomly distroying hours and hours of work. My machine has no Z limit switch so I can not store offsets, my tool height touch plate or manually is not accurate enough to pickup exactly where it left off when it does this stupid ethernet lost communications problem.

My only conclusion at this point after weeks of effort, at trying everything under the sun, is the ethernet smoothstepper is not a viable product for large milling!

One silly point that I have to ask "your not running the demo of Mach which has a limit of 500 lines?

yes, I am obviously running a real version, Running smaller code files of 30k are not a problem

What have you got the controller frequency set to?
Hood

can you tell me where this setting is?

Operator menu the ESS Config, should be first option if I recall.
Hood