Thanks Fernando for the patch! I had a little supprise once I installed the patched pam from source: after shutdown I couldn't get back in! I used a rescue disk though and fixed pam by removing all occurances of the $ISA variable in each of the files in pam.d, as I was getting /var/log/messages about pam not being able to find some of the .so files. My next questions are: 1. Why won't pam do what it needs to with this $ISA variable? 2. Now that I have a running RT kernel and a patched for rlimits pam with all users having "realtime" permissions; how should I start jackd and pd to take advantage of these changes? I run: nice -5 qjackctl (starting jackd with a priority of 89 as that seems to be as high a priority as qjackctl will let me pass) nice -5 pd But my latency values are about the same as running: qjackctl (and jackd at 0 priority) pd ...? Thanks for the continued help! -thewade