Hello, after trying unsuccessfully to get my fireface 800 working with my brand new DAW under win 7 (see post http://www.rme-audio.de/forum/viewtopic.php?id=9057) I decided finally to revert to XP pro SP3 to get the interface working. At first I was met with success and was able to get the computer up and running with cubase 5. This success however has been shortlived and the set up has been plagued with what appears to be firewire related problems which are as follows:

-1 out 2 times that I fire up the system the host light on the ff800 is red, sometimes I have to reset the computer/ff as many as 5 or 6 times to get the interface to be recognized by the computer, Ive tried reseting in every possible order and nothing seems to work better than anything else

- Often once the system IS running the audio will suddenly crash out repeating the last sound played like a broken record, even after shutting down cubase the sound persists until I reboot the whole system

-Occasionally when the host light is off and the computer seems to recognise the FF opening the totalmix mixer results in strange lag when I try to click on any the of the faders and lots of random metering. When I try to open cubase in this state it usually crashes out or even worse causes a bluescreen...

-Often but not always when one of the above problems is present the device manager shows an exclamation mark over the firewire driver

I am running the latest flash and latest FF drivers. The computer is strictly a DAW with no internet connection or any programs apart from Cubase and a bunch of plugins.
I am connecting via a fw 400 cable as I have read of compatibilty issues regarding fw800 and my motherboard does not have access to it.
I have tried replacing the firewire cable to no avail.
The FW port on the pc is connected directly to my mobo which is an ASus Rampage III extreme which uses the VIA VT6315N firewire chipset.
There are no other FW devices connected to either the interface or the PC.
The CPU is a quadcore 975k and I am running 6gb of corsair dominator triple channel ram, graphics card is an ASUS EAH5450, there is a single CRUCIAL C300 128gb SSD and an ASUS DVDR there is nothing else connected either internally or externally apart from keyboard and mouse.

I have read and reread everything on the RME forum and elsewhere online and tried everything I can think of short of buying a PCI firewire card. This problem has already forced me to lose face in front of clients and if I cant find a solution soon I will be forced to sell the FF and buy something else. I am getting desperate here and would prefer to hear from RME before shelling out for a TI firewire card if it turns out that this wont fix the problem.