I've made a bit of progress! I'm was tinkering around with every setting in the book and different combinations of settings-- doing everything I can think of to get this to work properly... suddenly on sunday, fx2 tables started to exit without crashing out pinball X! So far it is working-- I'm not certain if it is opening multiple versions of steam or not, but I'm going to run a few more tests this week... what I think I changed that might have helped was adding administrative privledges to pinball X, and setting Steam so it didn't automatically open when windows started-- so when I run a pbfx2 table from pinball X it logs me on to steam and runs the table-- then, when I quit steam with a button on my cab, it exits out and back to pinball x-- I can open another table and it still works-- I tested about three pbfx2 tables in a row and it seems to run!! I'm going to spend more time with it this week. I will keep you posted-- thanks for all the tips so far!