MIDI and Virtual Instrument Performance?

[Tbassist4]

Hello,
I'm a big newbie to Pro Tools, so I'm sorry if this is terribly simple. I've set up an Instrument Track in a project, with a simple midi riff, and Native Instruments Kore Player 2, with the Bellatrix sample pad loaded. It seems to be taking much heavier of a toll on my system than I think it should. Warnings pop up telling me that either CPU usage is reaching its ceiling (set at 85% right now), or that I need to increase the HW buffer size, which is already set at 1024. I'm running a Macbook Pro 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo with 2GB of ram and a Digi 003 Rackmount. I'm running Pro Tools 7.4.2 on Leopard.

With one patch, let alone 10, my computer should do just fine. I run Finale 2008 with sometimes over 30 simultaneous sample instruments loaded in Kontakt Player 2 with no problems in playback.

What settings do I have to change on my 003 to optimize my MIDI/Virtual Instrument performance? I'm sure that my problem lies more in my playback settings, rather than what my computer can handle.

Essentially, what needs to be set to what to have this run smoothly?