osodecanela | Year of the Dragon....

Yes, I know it's the year of the Rat. I wasn't talking about the Chinese zodiac. I was however referring to my voice recognition software.

I started using Dragon NaturallySpeaking several years ago. I've had a love-hate relationship with it, but it seems to be improving. I mostly use its dictate letters professionally since I suffer from fat finger syndrome. (The dreaded FFS!)

About a month ago, the program ceased working. I kept getting a COM error message E_FAIL, and the program would refuse to open. It took me a while to figure out how to get the information I needed. Tech support for this product runs $9.95 an inquiry, so it can get real expensive real fast. I finally had the time last night to nose my way through their website, and find their communities web board. I posted my problem, log back on today, and a community techie was able to point me in the right direction. Note, I had ready done a reinstall of the program, and gotten a new USB headset, neither of which fixed the problem. Turns out, it wasn't a problem with the program per se, but rather my user file have gotten corrupted. He gave me a way to deal with this, that I wasn't able to follow. However, I deleted the old profile with its corruptions, and started fresh with a new profile.

Voila! We're up and working again. It wasn't the most elegant solution, but hey, it worked so I am not complaining.