Core audio conflict with M-powered firewire driver

[bom619]

I'm an HD guy by day but I have a M-audio system at home to do editing. After recently upgrading my Tiger system to Leopard, I noticed a couple strange things happened when I opened more demanding sessions. The song would start fine and by the end, it would choke and my CPU in pro tools would redline... and stay there until I restarted my mac. The session would function but only after maxing my playback engine settings. The strangest part is mouse would actually turn off (I could see the red light) for almost a second and start working again. I would estimate the loss of available processor power to be 1/3 to 1/2... which might be ok for the users this product is marketed towards but not acceptable to anyone that knows better.

After wasting three days of my life, this is what I found. M-powered pro tools will run great off of my m-audio transit (96k usb interface) and displays none of the issues I listed above. They only happen when I run my 1814 off of my firewire bus. My session drive is mounted via Esata card in the express slot of my laptop and has never given me any problems with any piece of software (including previous versions of pro-tools). The fact that the session runs great using the USB driver associated with my transit most likely eliminates this from being a probable issue.

Why do I think it has something to do with core audio? Because I can see it in the apple activity monitor. I can watch the "coreaudio" process in the activity monitor turn red and fail at the exact moment my session takes a dump and my mighty mouse flashes off. Just playing the session will make it fail after a period of time but it will fail almost instantly if I adjust the volume of my laptop via the keyboard. Even with the coreaudio process dead in the activity monitor, most audio functions of the computer still function so you would most likely not notice unless you were looking for it.

My new install is 100% clean. I personally downloaded the most up to date version of every piece of software, driver, and plug in. I get the same problems with every third party plug in removed from the system. I have dumped my pref's at every stage before every start up of pro tools. Permissions have been repaired. I can duplicate this effect and it's resolution (by using the USB interfaade) every time I try and the only thing in common is my firewire interface.

I bill by the hour and this is costing me money. Please help.

Macbook Pro core2 duo 2.16 Ghz, 3 Gig ram
Osx 10.5.5
Pro Tools M-powered 7.4.2cs1
Pro Tools Le-7.4.2cs1
M-audio Fw1814
M-audio transit
M-audio Firewire driver V1.8.4-3
Apiotek dual esata express card
Music production/omf toolkits

[djani]

I think you should go back to Tiger...

[mradlauer1]

I wonder if there is some kind of conflict with the Express buss and the Firewire buss under Lepard?

[bom619]

Figured it out. The one and only classic pro tools remedy that was not tried was (of course) the one that worked. I downloaded the 10.5.5 combo update from the apple web site, installed it, and the problem went away (my clean system installation was from the DVD/software update). Awesome.