FireWire Solo totally hates my Desktop PC

I have this desktop PC Dell Dimension 9200 with QudaCode CPU at 2.4GHz, 4Gb of RAM. I added a Firewire card (VIA OHCI Compliant IEEE 1394 Host Controller) so that I can use my M-Audio Firewire Solo. That's when the horror started.

I found out that the audio playback was great on the Firewire Solo. I use HyperSonic 1.0 VST plug in with ASIO driver, and it was a totally awesome experience. But when I used it to record vocal, problem happened.

Here's the problem report I filed to M-audio:



I was a happy Firewire Solo user until recently brought a Dell Dimension 9200 Quadcore desktop computer. I got horrible cracking sound when I recorded voice from a dynamic microphone. I don't think it's the hardware problem since I use the Firewire Solo on my laptop (Lenovo x60t Tablet PC) and it was all working well. I enclosed a sample file so you can hear what kind of cracking sound I got. I tried doing recording on Audacity, Sonar 6 and Pro Tool M-Powered under both XP and Vista and it got the same problem. I was very frustrated and I don't know what could be the problem. I tried different length of Fireware cables and the problem still exist. Also my desktop OS s are actually very clean. Nothing much else is running. Can a bad firewire card be the problem, but then, how come playback has no problem, while the recording part is some troublesome.

Please give me some hints... this is SO irritating....

Here's the Firewire solo Driver I am running on XP.



Here's the fact the narrowed down from trial and error and by deduction:

• The Firewire Solo hardware itself has no problem because it works perfectly fine with my Tablet PC laptop.
• It's NOT the Firewire cable problem because I used the same cable as I used to connect to the Tablet PC. It's a 6 pin to 4 pin cable by the way. I also tried 6 pin to 6 pin long cable (2 feet) and short cable (1 feet). I got the exact same result.
• It has nothing to do with Stepspeed setting on my desktop because I tried turning it on and off, and in both case I got the same result.
  
• It has nothing to do with the operating system, because I just tried installing a clean XP system with absolutely nothing both the latest XP driver from M-Audio. I got the same result.
• I tried putting the firewire card in different PCI slots. Again, same result.
• It has nothing to do with other device interfering, since I tried unplug all the USB devices and have only the mouse and the keyboard connected. I got the same result.
  

So now the only one option that I can think of is try out another PCI Firewire card. There's nothing on the CPU that I can remove anyway.

Sigh.