SUBSIM Radio Room Forums - Another plea for save game help

Hi all. This may be an impossible question, but maybe someone else out there has had the same (or similar) problem and can shed some light on it. I don't use any of the supermods (my computer wouldn't handle them, I don't think), but over the years I have made a number of changes such as adding ships, HT, etc. Regardless of the mods, the game ran well, except for the occasional corrupt game save that everyone seems to experience. Loading a previous save would fix that and I was again on my way. I've completed careers as far as June of 1944, stopped only when I got killed. Now for the problem.

I recently tried my hand at modifying the SH3.dll in the sound folder with a hex editor. I tried to manually add bell sounds to Diving Duck's bouys, using his helpful instructions. I wanted to do it myself to get some experience with the hex editor (DD provides a complete .dll as well as what to add to an existing .dll). Anyway, I've made enough mistakes in the past to know to back-up everything first. After my edit, I began having a lot of save game problems. Assuming I messed something up, I 'returned to port' via an old save and restored my old sound .dll. I still had a lot of save problems. I tried going back to older and older successful saves, but the same thing happened. Finally, I deleted my current career and started a new one in 1939. I was then repeatedly getting a CTD at approximately the same geographical point on the map, a few kilometers out of Kiel, on my first patrol. I couldn't get past it. Seemed to happen regardless of the date, time of day, or time compression. At some point before it CTD's, the sound gets messed up in that when I pause the game, the background sound keeps playing , stuck in a loop. If I pause on the surface, I can hear the ambient wind. If I pause in the u boat, I hear the ambient sub interior. Both sound like a 'stuck record'. I even hear it on the save game menu. After many start-overs, I managed to time-compress past the point I kept getting the CTD's (lucky?), but the background sound is stuck as I described. I'm sure it's just a matter of time until I can't save anymore. I can't figure out whats wrong - I only touched the sound .dll, and restored the old one prior to a new career, nothing else has changed. Any ideas?