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

1) switched the asio driver

2) searched the big drive

i just proved that the soundblaster appears to not properly work over asio, so it's of minimal use to me anyways. it's coming out right this minute.

and, i suspect that xp may have problem with drives larger than 1 gb, which i'm going to try to deal with by repartitioning the big drive.