Digital Breakup and H/W Buffer Overrun all the time...

[Tony J]

Hi,
I'm new to protools and I'm having a big problem.

When I try to record plain old audio tracks I get digital break-up sounding input and H/W Buffer Overruns all the time. I even get this when I have the record-enable button on and have the record button blinking but haven't started recording yet. Why is this? I've gone through all the recommended settings from the Set-up section in the Manual but still get the same problem. I am able to get a clean record track on rare occassion if I quit and re-open the ProTools and record right away. But this only works once in a rare while and with no apparent difference from other times. Soon after that though buffer overruns and the digital break-up thing happens and I'm back in the land of mysterious confusion again.

Please advise.

Here's my systems set-up.

- Protools 5.3.3
- Mbox
- Windows XP Professional
- AMD 1.009 MHz
- 384 MB of RAM
- ASUS A7V Motherboard
- Maxtor 5 2049H4 SCSI Drive 20 GB
- LaCie 60 GB Firewire Drive
- NVidia GeForce DDR
- Creative SB Live Soundcard
- Promise Technology Inc. Ultra IDE Controller
- NERO Imagedrive SCSI Controller
- VIA OHCI Compliant IEEE 1394 Bus Host Controller

I have PTLE installed on the system drive and my audio sessions on the Firewire drive.

What to do, what to do??
Please advise.

Thanks,
Sincerely,
tonejac