I e-mailed technical-support about this problem and was told it is due to a corrupted voice model. The recommendation was to throw out the voice model. Working from a backup is risky because the corruption may have been present when the backup was made. I'd already started over several times and it was impossible to 'live with' because it happened too early in the training and required starting from scratch every time. In my case all this made ViaVoice unusable. The good news is that after updating to Mac OS X 10.2.2 (and 10.2.3) the problem no longer occurs. I do not know whether it was necessary, but I reinstalled ViaVoice and did a fresh enrollment after applying the updates. When the ViaVoice update was released I trashed my user files and started over again (again). I had never been able to get very far, so there wasn't much to trash, and I'd trained so many times that it doesn't take all that long now. nawfal umari