i have sound alerts in tws that generally work fine. but when i run excel vba it seems to steal sound from TWS temporarily. after vba is run TWS does not make a sound for several minutes and at some point the sound is back. I don't know why it is back either. Maybe it is back after TWS tries to make a sound, fails, regains sound capacity for the next alert. as I run VBA several times during the day I may miss a trade due to lack of sound, which could be a problem or a big problem. my VBA script does not have any sound related functions, it makes simple calculations based off TWSDde. i have XP, office 2003. does anybody else have this problem? what's the fix? Many Thanks!