newbie, problem with delay and noisy recording

Hi,
This is my first day with Sonar.  I have a dual core processor PC w'8G Ram, an M-Audio Fast track Ultra, and recording through a Rode NTK mic.  I dont have any plugins, just doing a straight recording track during my run through of the tutorial.  So in my first effort at recording a track I am having these two problems.

(1) in monitoring through headphones, when I say "check," there is a delay before I hear "check."

(2) while recording and monitoring with the headphones, I hear a random, intermittant clicking noise.  The noise is also present on the playback.

So this is my first hurdle.  The learning curve.  I ask of the experts out there if they can help.  Thx, Dave

hey man,welcome to the forum,sorry to hear about your troubles,have you installed the drivers for your m audio fast track yet?
it sounds like your having some latency issues where you get a delay from when you say hey...hey.(a second later)it means your sound card is sending the message but its not fast enough for your computer to process it,try teporay disabling you computers sound card.also just to be sure to see if your computer can handle digital audio recording run the dpc latency checker.(i know you have 8 gigs)but it will tell you alot. 

http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml

this is common with the crackle and small scratchy pops you are explaining..you might just need to update your driver or set your buffers a little differently in your settings.if you go to preferences,what setting is your playback and recording on?

also some more specs would help me and others to really benifit you actually to get this fixed and get you back to making music.
that latency checker is a good tool to see how your computer handles digital audio and how fast its processed.
i also didnt get what version of sonar you are using?
sorry dave im not an expert but i do know a thing or two about digital recording and can walk you through some things,more or less im a cakewalk user just like you man.
but we as users here love to help our fellow recording buddies out here in the cake world..lol.i hope some of this info helped and if anything i got you a bump.be patient man.

The clicking might be a wireless issue.Internet card, keyboard or mouse. Is this a laptop? When you run the DPClAT meter and there are red spikes those need to be brought under control. I find the wireless card is most always the issue. Battery management, System routines running. As you noticed the latency issue went away after you ran the wave profiler because it then optimized Sonar and your interface. But make sure to download the very latest drivers I'm assuming your on Windows 7 64 bit ( 8 gigs RAM) Make sure to use the ASIO drivers. Also set the use 64 bit and dual processor in audio options.