i've been saying for a while that connecting to the internet has been changing the tone, and that sometimes it seems like the bandwidth is cut.

i've deleted the firewire network port. and, in fact, i remember doing this once before. it's made an immediate difference in terms of opening the sound back up and making it sound less compressed. loading the tcp/ip layer may have been interfering with the stream some way or another.

before i did that, i cleaned the thing right out - deleted all the sound related drivers, wiped the registry, removed any executables. when i got the drivers back on, i had to flash the firmware again. this is something you don't want to do all of the time, as it's kind of dangerous; if there's a power outage, or just a fail, the device gets bricked. but, it's the only thing that is consistently getting me back to square one.

i then loaded the h20 drivers and it seems stable without the dongle running. but i'll have to give it another hour to see what happens.