I suggest a clean install of XP with at least 1GB of RAM and at least 1.5GHz proc. (here's the good stuff) Install the Digidesign hardware after the clean and stableized OS has been installed. (I mean get all your other hardware set up B4 installing the DD audio card). Ok, so you've dropped the new card in, XP finds the hardware, and you load the unsigned (but that's OK) driver you downloaded from DD. B4 you get all excited, you may have to start back pedaling. Click start, programs, accessories, system tools, and system information. Expand hardware resources and view IRQs. If the DigiDesign hardware is sharing an IRQ, you may have some stability issues, namely digital hiccups. Ifin the IRQ that windoze put your hardware on is shared with another piece of hardware, you have 3 options. 1, ifin it's something like a NIC, you can simply disable that device while using ProTools. 2, you can try a different PCI slot. Typically, the top slot shares IRQ with the AGP slot, and the bottom 2 share with each other and often onboard hardware. 3, Do yet another clean install (sigh!) with a modified hardware abstraction layer (HAL) changing from ACPI to Standard PC. This will allow you to assign IRQ's from BIOS vs letting Windoze do it. The trade off is you lose some automatic power features such as wake on lan, and power down on exit. Ifin anybody is interested in this HAL thang, I'll dig up the step by step I wrote about a year ago. BTW, the IRQ issue can hold true for any demanding hardware. Gamers will ofter modify their HAL to enhance video speed.