Hi I have been playing around with asterisk for a few days now. I have asterisk running with a single x100p card and a couple of x-lite "extensions". Here's where I am at: I can make calls between the extensions. Voice mail seems to work OK. I can use the x100p card to dial out to the PSTN over the analogue interface and receive calls fine. I have my FWD account hooked up as well and that seems to work ok. Yesterday I got festival connected up but I am seeing some bizarre behaviour. If in extensions.conf I have something like : exten => s,1,Answer exten => s,2,Festival('Hello') exten => s,3,Wait(4) exten => s,4,Hangup Then a call coming in over the PSTN is fine. I hear Stephen Hawking over the phone and nothing looks too bad on the console. However if I set up extensions.conf so that festival is invoked from one of my x-lite extensions then it all starts to get weird. It seems to work fine as long as I don't have my headset plugged into the PC where I have x-lite running! If I do then the call seems to be dropped immediately without me hearing festival. Similarly if I invoke festival as a result of a call from FWD it is also dropped. Where's best to start looking? I sort of thought I was getting to grips with SIP and asterisk (at least as a newbie ;-) ). Does the problem with the call being dropped indicate that I haven't really got x-lite / fwd running correctly with asterisk? It just seems so improbable that plugging in a headset on a PC could cause problems with software running on asterisk. Or is festival just a bit flaky and not to be trusted? Quentin