I recently purchased Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9 Essentials and tried to instal the program onto my computer. After installing and restarting my computer, I received this message, "A serious error occurred while initializing the NaturallySpeaking speech engine. Please try reinstalling to correct this problem.", when I tried to open the program. I tried repairing the installation twice and performed three additional removals and installations of the program. Each and every time I have received the same message. I currently more than fulfill the system requirements and I am not using Windows Vista.

Could someone help me out?

Our 1st recommendation would be for you to return your software to the manufacturer who guarantees a full refund for 30 days because DNS Preferred is the lowest version of NaturallySpeaking anyone should purchase. In our opinion DNS Standard is equivalent to using single ply toilet paper because it doesn't quite get the job done and Essentials is equivalent to being out of toilet paper altogether if you catch our drift. Essentials barely qualifies as a speech recognition toy let alone a speech recognition product. Enough with the lecture and now hopefully onto a solution...

You had the right idea with uninstalling and reinstalling but uninstalling doesn't get all the pieces and reinstalling doesn't replace all the parts so to speak. Use DNS9.5 Remover to remove every trace of NaturallySpeaking from your computer and then reinstall. This will give you a clean installation.

Additional responses to this question are available on the KnowBrainer Speech Recognition Forum