what am I doing wrong?

[She-Wolf]

Hello DW skippers, I have had DW 1.04 on my Windows 7 64 bit for some time, but only just got around to giving it a go. It seems reasonable to try it out 'as is' before I start choosing mods, but given that I am a rank beginner, and not very good at reading manuals, thought I would go for an easy mission, which led me to ''African Bees', assuming two stars equates with 'easy'.

Already I am in difficulties! There are two problems.

The first is that if I click on 'Options', with the view to being able to shut the music off ( for the sake of realism you understand), it brings up the speech recognition window, and wants me to go through the equipping and testing of my chosen device, which I am not interested in, so I get rid of that as soon as I can, but then the program crashes and I have to clear out the process and start over. I can live with the music if I have to, but thought I would mention it in case there is a ready solution.

The other problem may be me doing things wrong, but I don't see what that wrong might be.

I have to reverse my boat out of the docking bay, and after several goes I realise that putting the rudder over to hard right ( what happened to port and starboard?) and going back at engine 2/3rds, I can make a graceful exit and start lining my bow up to go through the harbour entrance. I KNOW I haven't hit anything astern, but I start seeing the damage percentage rise, and that sorta spoils it all for me as it seems I cannot even complete this simple move ( cant spell manoeuvre) in port. Hmph!