Well. 
Gave up. It just is not good enough (yet). 

So I installed windows 7 again (got to use a whole day, since everything else has to be installed also...) 

I'll be ready to move to windows 8 again when it is possible to use with a DAW. 


The DAW has been stable as a rock the whole day with Win7. 

Kris,
Thanks for the update.
If you had "imaged" Win 7, before installing Win 8, you would not need to re-install everything.
Just re-install the Win 7 image.
Thanks again for the update.

Tom

Yes, Tom, that would have been the easy way :)
I have my DAW backed up to my WHS2011 (complete image) but I wanted to have a completely new install as I was changing my OS SSD also. :)


Cant say I regret. The DAW runs with a latency of about 4-70


What I did find in my work to get this working, was a tool from these guys: 
http://www.smithsonmartin.com/free-tools/

The DPC Latency Enhancer.
(dont fill out the form and try to get it in the download link, the only thing I received was their other tool which was a emulator of a kind) 
I googled and found a download link somewhere else. 

This reduced the DPC latency from about 1000us to around 450us. This with windows8 though. 

New update: 
 
I got a new SSD and though: "what the heck. I'll try again"
Installed Win8.1 on that, and the legacy Firewire driver. 
And, thought I should try X3, so I got the X3 trial installed also. 
 
Works perfectly! Have been really stable (better than ever!) so I'm quite happy with the setup now. 
 

I don't have a firewire interface unit, but my main DAW system (Windows 7) was down as I had to send the motherboard back to Gigabyte for warranty repair.  I set up my backup system for Sonar X3, that had Windows 8.1 installed.  After installing everything, it worked exactly like my main system with Windows 7.  The only issue I had was installing my Frontier Tranzport, it had to be installed in a Vista compatibility mode, everything else installed in native Windows 8.1.

Yeah, I think probably Win8 is as stable as Win7 (at least after the latest fixes) 
The main issues has been for us with Firewire units, or older firewire units which works better with the legacy firewire driver. 
 
But, I also has a Egosys ESP 1010e interface, PCI-e. I tried this (before I installed my FW1884) and that one was completely messed up. Did not get it to work at all. DAW froze and had "black startups". And this has quite new drivers, also for Win8.
 
So - my advice for everyone is to try your gear on a completely new install like I did. If it hadn't worked, the only thing I had to do was to connect my other OS SSD with Win7 and I was good to go 

I had a lot of problems with firewire, as I had an Alesis IO26 and then a Focusrite Saffire Pro 40.  I was using an Intel motherboard that had the T.I. firewire chipset (reason I bought the Intel motherboard).  That was initially on Vista 64 bit but later upgraded to Win 7 64 bit.  When the Saffire Pro 40 died (and it was going to cost almost as much as I paid for it to get it fixed) I dumped firewire and went to USB.  I have lower latency with USB (6 ms compared to 11 ms with the Saffire Pro 40). 

kristoffer,
Thanks for the update!
Maybe there is hope for the 1884's future.
 
Tom

Yes, Tom - its been stable for all my "work" a few days now. 
So its looking promising. 
 
And, I've managed to solve the issue with having to restart the computer with "driver signing" also. 

woho, happy days! 
 

4 weeks since the last update, just wanted to state that the FW1884 and Windows 8.1 has been stable as a rock and no issues at all these weeks. 
 
Using it with Sonar X3(d) Studio. Using the firewire legacy driver.