well, microsoftupdate either took care of the problem, or i was doing something really dumb... i updated and rebooted, and it asked me to log in, and the error stopped.
it still requires my "approval" from Vista to run on startup, though, and i have never (in any Filter incarnation) seen any sort of pop-up or indicator that anything is happening.
also, how deep into a folder does Filter search for media files? most of my music is 4 folders deep (my music/*genre*/*artist*/*album*/*title*). should i start including each genre-folder, or artist-folder in my list to get a reaction out of Filter?
"It's no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." Krishnamurti