Hi raybe, I use Microsoft Anna mostly because NeoSpeech Kate became a problem for me. I have 32 bit Vista dual core. If I start Hal with Kate, no voice. I change to Anna and it works. I then change back to Kate and then it will work. No idea why. It started when lightspeed came out with hapswap, tho I don't see any connection there. All I had to do then would be to say "change voice to..." and back again to fix.
More questions than answers here but would certainly be interested in a fix for this issue.