New suggestion regarding speech-dispatcher

[Keith Hinton]

Could it perhaps be nice values? 
Speechd-up is set to minus five, on my computer. Speech-Dispatcher (though I have not looked yet) is probably set to nice plus five.
These should work, but apparently:
While running Speechd-up in GDB, I got speech to die. But speechd-up just stopped working normally, did not output anything to send to the developers of the software. I would like to find out what types of nice values some of you folks use. Speech-dispatcher and or at this point I no longer know if speechd-up itself is the cause, but speech-dispatcher appears to be what is breaking, something perhaps with it's C interface,  I don'tk now anymore.
The point is, what other types of nice values could I use, without maxing out the CPU's in my dual-core box?
I'll chek back shortly, regards --Keith