M-Audio 410 driver drops out on internal Firewire port

I have run into a rather strange problem with my internal firewire port. This problem only effects my M-Audio 410 exteral audio device. I've done a lot of tech support but this one is making me scratch my head. Symptoms are as follows:

1. My Firewire external Drive has no problems running on the port.

2. M-Audio 410 driver will drop out at some point in its operation. It can happen anywhere in the time frame of 1-4 hours. All drivers are current running under XP service pack two with a bare bones operating system. Running under a fresh OS install

3. Under the same operating system and conditions the M-Audio card works flawlessly using a PCI Firewrire Card. If I attatch the Firewire drive this quickly causes the M-Audio card driver to drop out. So I thought Oh it's the drive causing the problem. However, the problem exists on the interal firewire port regardless of whether the drive is attatched or not. Very stange. At first I thought I had resolved the problem narrowing it down to the external drive being attached but no (LOL), the problem exists with the drive completely removed from the stystem.

4. I should mention that the M-Audio card was replaced with a brand new one from M-Audio. The original card experienced similar problems as above but then finally died altogether. It no longer recieved power. I had initially thought the M-Audio unit was just bad and the problem would be completely resolved with a new one.

5. The new m-audio unit works fine but only if I use it on the PCI firewire card without the external firewire drive attatched. I only have one PCI slot on this unit which I'd like to use for something else other than a PCI firewire card.

The following may or may not be related:

6. I reset the BIOS on the motherboard using the jumper and returned the BIOS to the manufactures settings. These are the same setting under which the card performed flawlessly for almost a year.

7. I had a brand new wireless keyboard go bad on me with in the same time period. It was not a complete failor. The mouse would send bad info to the receiver. Example: I would click on somthing and hold the mouse button down to drag a window but it would release the window prior to releasing the button i was holding down etc. The keyboard was replaced and works perfectly now.

8. My MAG LCD monitor under a year old will go blank if the brightness value is turned up above 70 percent.

So, I've had strange problems with 3 peices of hardware within the realative same time period. These problems did not however occure at same time, just in close proximity.

The keybaord problem is where it all started to happen. At first I thought it was a virus that was effecting the mouse operation. This is what initially caused me to install a new fresh OS. At which point I started to have problems with the original m audio 410 ... which eventualy over a period of days completely died and had to be replaced.

I've never had so many things go wrong all in short span of time and I'm wondering if there is any relationship to each other.

Could a power surge cause these things to have gone wrong? My own thinking is that if there was a power surge it would have rendered these devises completely inoperatable and dead rather than the strange problems i have been having.

The PC I'm using is manufactured by MusicXPC.com (model: C2). It's still under warranty and so I have the option to have it replaced but I would probably loose the unit for month while being repaired which really is not an option for me right now unless absolutely nessecary.

The tech guys at MusicXPC and M-Audio are a bit stumped. So I just found the FixYa.com site today and thought I would give it a go to see if anyone has an idea of what is causing this to happen???

Some questions I have asked myself but have not been fully able to answer:

1: Is the computer some how causing these strange failures to occure?? Perhaps there is a problem with the power supply in the unit??? It seems like a weak answer to the problems considering all the clues but I'm not sure.

2: Would a power surge be responsible for these strange problems?? Again, it seems like a power surge would have caused more severe problems such as total failure rather than strange intermitent problems.

3. IRQ problem? internal firewire runs on IRQ 18, shared with the USB controler. There are no USB devices attatched to this computer. PCI Firewire card runs on IRQ 22 with nothing else sharing it. The card only has firewire on it, both 400 and 800 connections (no USB)

4. Could automatic udates from Microsoft have caused something to be different. I did update the fresh install with MS updates. This seems to be an unlikely answer though since the m audio 410 works fine on the PCI firewire. If the updates effected something it would have to have effected only the internal firewire port...

Thanks for all your help. Be glad to return the favor down the line. I have a lot of experience with both hardware and software especially where audio is concerned but this problem just has me stumped...

Sincerely,

Dean

techinfo@ContinuousMix.com