Ok, to confirm (after testing) my questions and Alex's answers:
I can stream music from MC10 to MC9.1
It makes no difference if I run the laptop from a network share or through media server - it still has the breaks in service due to the Saving Database.
However, I am still stuck withe the Saving Database issue! I don't actually understand what is being saved? I have one machine with a library of 20k songs, sitting idle, streaming music to a laptop which is sending the music to the stereo. Neither of the machines are doing anything else, and neither of the other two machines on the network are making any changes to the MC database in any way. So what is happening and why is it necessary in this case?
It seem that the only option for me now is to try MJ8 on the laptop and run it off a network share - which is a shame because streaming is so much neater. If this doesn't work, I will have to use some sort of lightweight mp3 player such as winamp on the laptop, but this would irk me greatly after having told so many of my friends that MJ / MC is the ONLY jukebox to have and they are wasting their time with anything else!
Is there a registry setting I can turn off Saving Database with?
BTW Alex, I appreciate your comments on upgrading the OS, but this is putting the cart before the horse. This combination used to work fine with MJ8 and I had many months of trouble free usage. I dutifully upgraded to MC9 and then MC10 to support the development of the package, I really don't use the additional features. The Saving Database became an issue in MC9 as far as I remember, and I am loathed to move back to MJ8, but if that's what it takes, then that is what I'm going to have to do.
BTW, It would have been nice to get some sort of warning that MC10 would not run on Win98 too
Alban