hi rick, ziad--

let me preface by saying that i have no problems seeing activity with another subject, although i get the same message and have all my surfaces included in that spec file.

i edited the problematic spec so that i only have my smoothwm and flatmap, and toggling See Overlay gets the activity onto the surface w/o the error about LDP--but i get very little of my activity onto the surface. Also, there is no outline of my smoothwm in my SurfVol_Alnd_Expvol.

With the other subject, which works, i get an outline around the smoothwm and pial boundaries, getting alot of the activty i'd like on to the brain. can i make this happen with my problem subject? otherwise, i lose a hell of a lot of activity.

i get a link receipt error for each surface, stating the following:

SUMA_ijk surface dataset idcode is XYZ_1T1... Can't find this in AFNI
SUMA_node_normals surface dataset idcode is XYZ_1T1... Can't find this in AFNI

i modified my spec file as follows:
__________________________________________________________
# define the group
Group = db

# define various States
StateDef = smoothwm
StateDef = pial
StateDef = inflated
StateDef = patch.3d
StateDef = patch.flat
StateDef = sphere
StateDef = qsphere

NewSurface
SurfaceFormat = ASCII
SurfaceType = FreeSurfer
FreeSurferSurface = lh.smoothwm.asc
LocalDomainParent = SAME
SurfaceState = smoothwm
EmbedDimension = 3


NewSurface
SurfaceFormat = ASCII
SurfaceType = FreeSurfer
FreeSurferSurface = lh.patch.flat.asc
LocalDomainParent = lh.smoothwm.asc
SurfaceState = patch.flat
EmbedDimension = 2
___________________________________________________________

i also tried including 3 surfaces in my spec--smoothwm, pial, and flatmap using the smootwhm as the LDP for all three.

again, i do not get the LDP error message, but the activity looks very strange. looks like speckles of activity stretched out along my surface (if you can picture that). also, i don't get the outline of the whitematter/graymatter borders.

also, when i toggle See Overlay, i get the following message:
Error SUMA_process_NIML_data: nel idcode is not found in DOv
Error SUMA_niml_workproc: Failed in SUMA_process_NIML_data

in sum, let me state what i hope to do, and you let me know iif this is possible:
show activity on my flatmap existing between the smoothwm and graymatter borders.