so, the recording machine has been a bit more stable recently, until i did two things:

1) opened cubase

2) searched the 2 tb drive

i just proved that the audigy does not work properly over asio, so it's of minimal use to me, anyways. it's coming out. immediately.

i suspect that xp may have problems with drives larger than 1 tb, which i'm going to try to deal with by breaking the 2 tb drive up into smaller partitions.