Rick, can you send a testcase to CFFI mailing list perhaps along with the results of running CFFI's testsuite?

yes of course, ill get another crack at that windows machine later today or tomorrow. but im thinking that this may be due -- in whole or in part -- to a problem with the .dll itself because i couldnt load it into lispworks personal either. (the portmidi.dll was sent to me by someone with a c compiler on xp...) i also have a CFFI interface to MidiShare that works in clisp on osx, ill download the xp midshare distribution and try that too...