hey paradocs and steven, thanks for the suggestions. sorry it took so long to answer back, but have been out of town.

when i use paradocs 'solution' (mpg321) the mp3's do play immediately. NO PROBLEM with the shell - so - i guess the problem is in XMMS. I have tried stevens suggestion - and yes - killing the first process does kill all other xmms tasks, but when i open another mp3, xmms just hangs. the grep returned NOTHING.

looking at the dpkg, there are no updates available to xmms.

tried to configure the OSS driver, but nothing <obvious>.

tried 'configure soundcard' in the knoppix menu, which gave me just an hourglass then the process stopped.

any more thoughts??? Is there another X application that I can test with or use instead of xmms that you are aware of that I can apt-get with limited dependancies? I'm kinda a nb with linux and haven't figured out how to work with application interactions on install yet.