Well, at least I can skip version 1.7 and go straight to 2.0 - maybe that will help me catch up
I did note one small thing while reading through your updated first post above about the new version 2.0 - there seems to be a broken link to the .csv file structure document - I keep getting 404 errors when I try to click that link. Not a huge issue since the document is included in the download, but just thought you might want to know about it since some folks will probably try the link in your post as well.
[edit] - another small question - if I currently have version 1.63, with SDK 5.1, perl and python installed as that required, and I want to move to 2.0 -- I plan on just renaming my 1.63 folder to set it aside as backup, and then unzip the 2.0 files into a new c:\SH4Speech folder for now. Now, the question - do I need to remove or uninstall either the perl or python instances so you can get a good idea as to whether 2.0 works well without them, or can I just leave them where they are and 2.0 just won't use them?