Stay away from Cubase 4 for the time being, it's still too new and has too many bugs that need to be ironed out. I use Cubase SX3, it's perfect, no bugs at this stage, you can download all of the fixes from the steinberg website. In another year or so I might buy the upgrade to Cubase 4 but beside a couple of nice little vst's there donesn't seem to be that many groundbreaking new features that are going to make my life any easier. As far as LE goes, yeah that is a hugely watered down version compared to SX3. TO get the most out of Cubase you really need to have a nice physical system though, processor speed, ram, motherboard and chipset and very importantly your soundcard.