Hound Dog

Somebody - please - help! I own both an NW-HD3 and NW-HD5. I recently bought a new PC that has VISTA as its operating system, so I installed the 4.3 version of SonicStage. When I connect either of my Sony MP3 players the following happens; The PC recognises the device as a removable drive. SonicStage recognises the device intermittently - only for a second or so at a time before it fails, then recognises it again, then fails, etc. It also flashes up a message saying that my device contains tracks that were transferred from a previous version of SonicStage and that these tracks must be removed via the 'Control - device/media - delete all tracks' command. I can't do this as SonicStage is inoperable when my HD3 is plugged in, and I've already initialized and re-formatted the HD3 via its own menu, so there's no tracks on it anyway. SonicStage becomes virtually inoperable while this is happening, until in the end I have to use task manager to shut down the program. I've tried turning off the battery (overnight) on my HD3 before reconnecting to the PC but that didn't make any difference either. I've tried reinstalling SS 4.3 about 5 times. I've tried installing 4.2 as well. Nothing works. Any ideas? Having now read the FAQ's more fully, I've uninstalled the codec pack I had on my machine, I'm not connecting via a USB hub, and when I tried to re-set the start value of 'sptd' under the 'Hkey local machine' prompt (as detailed within the faqs), no 'sptd' branch exists! Please can anyone help? I'm tearing my hair out in clumps as I type...