Has anybody been able to get a Variax 300 guitar working correctly with Variax Workbench, using Windows and a USB interface?  I've searched the forum, and most of the issues people have had seemed related to a lack of  Win 7 drivers, but that has since been addressed.

Everything seems fine when using the Monkey update utility...it did a nice job installing drivers for the USB interface, updating my version of Workbench and even flashing the latest 3.1 firmware in the guitar itself.  It has absolutely no problem recognizing the guitar and communicates with it.

However, Variax Workbench is a basket case...it initially recognizes the guitar and downloads all the presets in it, but from that point forwards it's a useless mess.  I can SOMETIMES manage to edit guitar models, but even when it works it's slow and klugey...changes are slow to be reflected in the audio output from the guitar, and various strange pops and computer noises are generated and fed to my amp. Eventually there will be an ugly pop and a window pops up telling me that the Variax has been disconnected. At that point I need to exit the software, power cycle the guitar and start from scratch. In the rare event that I'm actually able to customize a model to my liking, attempting to write to the guitar results in the "disconnected" error, every single time.

I've tried this on three different computers now, two running Windows 7 and the third running XP and get the same erratic results on all three. I've also tried different USB cables and also tried replacing the Line 6 data cable with a short CAT5 cable, which works (or should I say, doesn't work!) exactly the same. All ethernet pins in the guitar and interface are clean and straight. I'm running the guitar from the power supply box (labelled "XPS MINI") that came with the guitar, there are no batteries installed.

The guitar has pretty much sat in my closet for the past few years, only coming out when I need a very distinct tone (such as sitar, banjo, dobro, etc.) that I can't produce with my conventional guitars. But my band is performing several songs requiring an open tuning and/or a good acoustic sound, so I thought it would be grand to load a few presets that met these needs with a flick of a switch, and bought the USB interface with that in mind. I was looking forward to not dragging my acoustic and alt-tuning guitars around to gigs, so it's really disappointing to find that Workbench just doesn't work!

I'd appreciate any suggestions, thanks in advance.