i am a manual machinist by trade, and have only done minor cnc (dos machines and fanuc) in college. so im not sure what u mean, the i can get the exact make on the computer and the video card i installed

I am meaning the CNC hardware, stepper drives or servo drives and breakout board make or failing that can you give me a link to the make of machine control you have?

Hood

gotcha  http://www.deepgroove1.com/cncmill.htm

have any of the previous suggested solutions involved manually moving the axis away from your limit switches? or is it even near a limit switch?

you may well have a different problem than what we have  had, but every time I get an Estop that really doesn't want to clear, it's solved by exiting and reloading Mach3, and manually forcing the axes away from their limit switches

this is being set up out of the box. i havent set up any limits yet, this being said is it still possible one of my axis is cranked all the way out and that is the problem?

Thats strange, seems your mill has a G540 and someone else is having issues with E-Stop, wonder if its a related problem.

Hood

I'll check and see if ours are G540s, but I don't guess it had occurred to me it was a fault of the drive, since most the time this has happened, we've run into the limit switches at a pretty substantial speed

I'll check and see if ours are G540s, but I don't guess it had occurred to me it was a fault of the drive, since most the time this has happened, we've run into the limit switches at a pretty substantial speed

Two words, "Soft Limits". Unless your machine looses its way using soft limits will help you prevnet hitting the limits hard. It is a very good feature to make use of

we've run into the limit switches at a pretty substantial speed

Are you still on the limit switches?
If so go to settings page and press auto limit override and then you should be able to reset and back off the switches.
Hood

hmm, thought I replied to this...

I didn't mean to imply that this is a current problem for me, I was just offering something for moonrunner to try, see if it solved it. It's been quite some time since I've seen this happen on our machine, though I have been meaning to try again to learn how to use soft limits anyway