M-Audio FW 410 - no W8 support.  I have yet to find a person who runs W8 with no problems.
 
Presonus Inspire GT - same as above but someone claims they have it working in W8
 
Focusrite - FW units have drivers for W8.
 
RME - driver support on everything.  They even brought some legacy products back to life.
 
It looks like USB is the in thing.  Few manufacture for PCIx.
 
Affordable USB replacements seem to be anything Focusrite, Steinberg UR-22, Komplete Audio 6.
 
I will not be buying any hardware from M-Audio, Tascam, Yamaha and Presonus. Part of it is quality and long lists of legacy products.
 
 Even Mac users got burned with FW devices. 
 
 It will be interesting how much legacy support will be in W10.
 
 
 
 

It's sad how M-Audio went from great to lame. I've used their Delta 44 for over 10 years and only once had an issue with a driver. At one point, all my gear was M-Audio - midi controllers, preamp, monitors, audio interface... They made solid budget gear and their support was always great.
 
Even under AVID, I couldn't say a bad thing about them - heck, I got to run Pro Tools w/o buying any other hardware while the people who'd bought their Digi 001 at the same time as I'd bought my 44 were left behind.
 
But sometimes around the time when AVID let them go, things seemed to start going downhill... I can't recommend their product anymore - and anyway, there are now many alternatives for that specific market where they excelled in the past.
 
 

Then there is Echo/Event.  Nice products back in the day.  Gave MOTU, and the higher ups, a run for their money I thought.

kitekrazy1
I have yet to find a person who runs W8 with no problems.
 

 
Now you have.  I installed a version back of Win7x64 Delta drivers and my 66 screams with no problems, no hiccups.  Running 6.8ms RTL at 48K
 
That's not to say that Avid isn't lame for letting support drop for my 13 yo audio interface  :)

Focusrite Saffire works great in 8.1

Rain
It's sad how M-Audio went from great to lame. I've used their Delta 44 for over 10 years and only once had an issue with a driver. At one point, all my gear was M-Audio - midi controllers, preamp, monitors, audio interface... They made solid budget gear and their support was always great.

 
I dunno, they were always somewhat flakey with regards to drivers. I had a Delta 1010 back in the day and it was a lot of grief. First thing was it wouldn't share IRQs. If something else was on its IRQ it went nuts. Thing is, IRQ sharing is part of the PCI spec and ACPI spec. So you had to fuss around with your system to make it work.
 
Then Windows 2000 happened and man, with getting drivers for that. They first said "There will never be native 2000 drivers, WDM is not acceptable for pro audio it is too high latency." Of course WDM/KS was part of the spec from the word go, M-Audio just didn't read the spec I guess. Finally they got aware of KS and made drivers... which supported 2 of the 10 channels. They said "This is an inherent limitation of WDM, nothing we can do!" I couldn't believe that so I e-mailed MS about it and I think they were sufficiently surprised with the stupidity of my question that they actually responded with links to Technet documentation about how WDM could do with single devices with more than 2 channels or multiple 2 channel devices like 98. Sent that on to M-Audio, no response, but eventually their multi-channel WDM drivers came out.
 
I wrote them off long before the Avid thing. Focusrite and RME make me happy these days.

Yeh, and you just can't find RS-232 interfaces anymore, either!
 
I'm not too concerned about the remaining lifetime of my Firewire interface, because like many units nowadays, it swings both ways: FW or USB. Worst-case scenario is that some future version of Windows forces me to switch cables.
 

I wish more companies would simply include removable cards to swap Firewire, USB, Thunderbolt, Dante, etc.  It is something you see at the high end level, but not on advanced or "pro-sumer" level interfaces.  I went with RME because of their long history of supporting everything they ever made, even discontinued products.  
 
USB is going to be around for the foreseeable future, it is a pretty safe bet for future proofing.  
 

I will not be buying any hardware from M-Audio, Tascam, Yamaha and Presonus. Part of it is quality and long lists of legacy products.

 
Just a quick note that Steinberg interfaces are Yamaha built and designed products.  The quality is actually excellent as is the higher end Yamaha pro audio equipment.  Though driver support is historically not that good as you pointed out.    

my Maudio Audiophile 192 is rock solid on Win XP.
 
 
what am i missing?
 

batsbrew
my Maudio Audiophile 192 is rock solid on Win XP.
 
what am i missing?
 

About three updates and twice as many headaches....