I had a serious problem in a recording session last week, and I would like to take steps to insure that it never happens again.  I'm wondering what preventive measures I can take, particularly with regard to the Fireface 800.  Would re-installing the Firmware have any benefit?

In the middle of a location recording session last week (four tracks) - in the middle of recording a take - there was a sudden error where the audio output we were monitoring from the headphone jack on the Fireface started looping.  The Fireface's Buffer size was set to 1024 samples, and I believe that it was this amount of audio that was looped.  It sounded like a CD skipping, and I believe it is similar to the issue described by some posters using Windows 7 - although I am running XP.

After tearing our headphones off, I found that my DAW, Pyramix, had crashed and locked up, so I terminated it in the Task Manager and restarted the computer.  I then picked up my headphones and found that the audio looping was continuing, so I turned the Fireface off and then on again, which seemed to reset everything.

I needed to reboot into Windows a second time before anything started to work properly, but after that, I was able to continue with the session, however the unwelcome "break" in the recording lasted about ten minutes and caused me much embarrassment.

I was also running a backup recorder, attached via SPDIF to the Fireface (to record the two most important tracks).  The routing of this signal is done with TotalMix, routing the Fireface inputs directly to the SPDIF output, so that this signal bypasses the DAW software entirely.  When I reviewed my backup later, I found that the whole take was there, intact.  The affected take from Pyramix was trashed completely, and attempts to restore it failed.  All other takes, before and after, are fine.  So, while the input and output to my DAW was affected, the direct feed from Input to SPDIF was unaffected - not even a little gitch where the issue occurred.

I'd like to make sure this never happens again.  I restored my Windows installation from a cloned backup that was made prior to this session, but I'm wondering if there isn't something similar to be done with the Fireface.

Would reinstalling the Firmware have any effect? 

Is Firmware something that can be corrupted?

I was running all equipment off an AC power line conditioner (Furman AR-1215), so I'm reasonably sure that the power was clean.  The lights did not dim or flicker, so I don't believe there was a brown-out or power interruption.

Apart from wearing headphones, nobody was even touching any of the equipment in the entire recording chain.  There was no physical action on anyone's part that could have caused this sudden issue.

My system is configured:

Fireface 800 -> Glyph 062 RAID hard drive -> MacBook Pro version 3.1 (silver keyboard, late 2007), running Boot Camp 2.1 with Windows XP Pro 32 bit SP3.  All Firewire connections FW800 with FW800 (nine pin) connectors.

Fireface 800 Firmware 2.77; Driver version 2.9992; DDS NOT active.  Sample rate set by DAW.

DAW Software:  Pyramix version 6.2.4 Native Music Pack.  Sample rate 88.2 kHz.