After reinstall, Mackie Onyx 1620+FW card can't seem to work inside Sonar (XP SP3)

May I ask the users of Mackie Onyx FireWire card (the original one, not the new Onyx-i series) for help?
Previously I was using my Onyx 1620+FW card with Sonar 7 on WinXP SP2, running 1.0.x drivers (the Onyx Control panel) without any serious issues, I could run at latencies, there were no drop out or artifacts.

I needed to reinstall the whole system and decided to upgrade to Sonar 8.5 (8.5.3) and also to go to XP SP3 (32-bit). Now, I can't seem to make the Onyx work with my system anymore. I tried both the original drivers (which came with the FW card on the installation CD) and the most recent ones from Mackie website (1.1.1) - each time on a different disk partition. I either have no audio at all (the track meters show nothing, nothing gets recorded, nothing get played back) or experience faulty performance (long pauses, Sonar's position cursor jumping instead of moving smoothly) or just digital distortion instead of anything else. Also, it doesn't operate in 24-bit no matter what I do - the status bar always shows XX kHz,  16-bit (I even tried to edit the config file manually but it still shows 16-bit even though there's 24-bit set in Options/Audio/General).

I really don't know what to do since I've tried everything I could think of. Should I reinstall the system back to SP2? If so, which version of Onyx drivers should I use? On Mackie forums I read about some FireWire fix but I was unable to find the fix package on the internet. ALso, the author od the thread states it fixes SP2 behavior but I used to have no problems under SP2... What's wrong?

Can any of the original Onyx users give me a detailed step-by-step to make the damn device work flawlessly under 32-bit XP SP3 with Sonar 8.5PE?

Thank you so much in advance!

Thank you for the reply, Mike. I spent some three hours fiddling with it yesterday. Here's the outcome:

0) The 16-bit x 24-bit thing was truly my idiotic fault, I missed the settings in Project/Global - that is solved, thanks.

1) The installation. It is very interesting that you installed 1.1.1 over 1.0.2(?), becuase the 1.1.1 release notes state (I think it's page 4/5) that you should uninstall the older drivers first - I did yesterday - uninstalled 1.0.2, rebooted and that ran the installer of 1.1.1 which gave me report that there had been a previous installation, which means that the 1.0.2 uninstaller does had not really cleared the registry (!!!).

I used to run the Onyx in WDM mode flawlessly as well (under the previous SP2 system) - never tried the ASIO because there was no need to. Yesterday, after the installation of 1.1.1 the first strange thing is that on the Sonar/Options/Audio/Drivers tab the input names are mingled - they are disordered:
http://www.caco.cz/onyx1.jpg

And when I start a project, assign the input and arm the track, voila:
http://www.caco.cz/onyx2.jpg

The meters go to instant clip and noise comes in. I have no idea, what's wrong.
I also have no idea how to set up anything on Driver Profiles tab - be it the "Stream >16 bit" or anything else 
I also managed to get it armed and record but it didn't work smoothly, there were big delays and the cursor jumped jerkily with the playback being the same... Also, it doesn't seem to get the latency right.

So that's the WDM story - that one seems totally messed-up, I really have no idea why. The 1.0.2 version was almost the same but there were some more problems with Onyx Control Panel.
I'd rather go WDM way as I know it did work in the past. I have the same hardware (the mobo, RAM etc.), the same cable, the same FW card... I'm lost in this.

So I switched to ASIO.
The drivers' order is normla now but it's interesting that the names contain only odd numbers:
http://www.caco.cz/onyx3.jpg

However, unlike WDM this seems to work a lot better. I can set up the track and arm it for recording, record and play back the audio, even with 64 samples (1.5 ms) of latency (still in 44.1 kHz/24-bit). The only strange thing is that when I first arm the track for recording, the meters show the signal present on that input ok, then I record and stop the recording, even with the track armed, the meters don't show anything - as if there is no signal present. But if I start the recording again on the same track (the R red, meters show nothing!), the audio signal gets recorded... Is this Onyx-unrelated issue? Some bug in Sonar?

So that's my story so far.
Mike, can you elaborate on ASIO x WDM performance? I hate the idea that I'd have to sacrifice the better performance because I caanot run the Onyx in WDM mode...

Thank you for helping me.

The reason I install the drivers off the disc first is because that seems to be the only way to install the control panel.
If you just go to the Mackie site you can get the drivers but no control panel. Then when I go to install the control panel off the disc it won't let me because it wants to install the drivers off the disc too. 


And yes, you need to uninstall the older drivers first.
After I un-installed the old drivers I was getting the previous version is installed message too.
So before I install the new drivers I run CCleaner to clean the registry.
CCleaner is a safe, easy to use and free program. I have never, in the 3 years I've been using it, had it clean something it shouldn't. 


Mike 

Strange indeed, I'm running 8.5.3 on XP and things work as they should.

Mike