[Five]

Yeah, after reading thru this it sounds like a problem with ME. Hopefully you will be able to encode to FLAC successfully at some point, but until then we can live with SHN. Did you try encoding with FLAC frontend? It's a longshot, but try the "Secure conversions to FLAC" link in my sig, when you follow the tutorial put WAV files in foobar and go from there and see if that works.