See if you can determine which chipset your Firewire connection is using.
 
For audio, it NEEDS to be Texas Instruments

DumbGuy56
THANKS again guys
 
1.  Yes - the MultifaceII in the picture is the same as mine. 
2.  It is powered by firewire.  I will try an external source.
3. I have contacted RME.
4. I will try a new interface later today.  I have a Steinberg UR22 - USB interface from school that I can try.  It is brand new.
5.  I downloaded the latest drivers from RME.  For this until, they offer the WDM drivers, which state that they include ASIO drivers; however, when I set it to ASIO, all the analog channels are not usable.
6. I so know how to switch to the build-in motherboard sound, so, if the UR22 does not work, I will try the onboard sound.  I do, however, seem to remember that the onboard sound was not compatible with the DAW.  I do not quite remember why.
Mr. Rabeach - sounds like you have a handle on the electrical part, but I took my last electrical engineering class in 1975.  Can you translate to either English or New Jersey for me?
 
Thanks to all of you for your help.  Although I do not do a lot of recording with my microphones, I have several projects that will require their use, so I want to resolve this.
 
Thanks again - I will update later.

Your PC power supply may be failing or you have a power problem associated with firewire on the PC side or in the device itself. Just a guess though. 

OK- NOW I am going to live up to my handle as a true "DumbGuy" -  I borrowed a new audio interface and dropped by my local computer store to ask the techs there about some possibilities.  THEN I came home, and went to set up the new interface, but first I had to turn the old one off, which means I had to slide out the woofer cabinet to get to the back switch.  As I reached down for the on-off toggle, I noticed that one of the speaker wires detatched from the back of the woofer (which is also the electronics part of the Blue Sky 5.1 speaker system. Well, before I turned the system off to try the new interface, I decided to try the MultifaceII again with the speaker reattached.
There are no more clips!!!!!
 
AHHHHHHHHHHH>
 
Still, I need to figure out how to set up the ASIO driver, so all is not in vain.
 
If you could see my face, I would be looking extra stupid.

OK - forget that one - the clicks are back.
 
The system had been off for about 18 hours, so when I turned it on - it took a while for the clicks to starrt up.  OK - on to the new interface
 

Do you have anything to do with worclock or ADAT running?

One Idea - Put your moblie phone in another room.
 
 
It is amazing how much trouble they can cause when recording.

Bristol_Jonesey
See if you can determine which chipset your Firewire connection is using.
 
For audio, it NEEDS to be Texas Instruments

VIA perfectly OK as well..

If you get the same issue with a second AI, I would pull the power supply and check it,
assuming you have a meter, or take it to a shop for a bench check. It could easily be
giving you the noise you're seeing. For a replacement, your specs indicate you could
operate perfectly well with less than half of that 1200w beast, unless you have a really
insane video card.

DumbGuy56

 
Bob -
1. - The computer has no wireless and is not connected unless I plug in the cable

Just a thought : removing the LAN cable is not enough. You need to disable the LAN in Device Manager. Especially for recording. That action cured my latency problem.

There was a thread started by Bitflipper in another forum (Techinques ?) that gave some simple scripting solutions that would disable then enable your LAN from the desktop.

Also make sure Bluetooth Service really is disabled.

Cheers,
Jerry

At this point I would clean up around your system, Disconnect everything. 
If you have a hardwired mouse and keyboard use them. 
Get all sources of RF interfearance out of the room. 
Don't even plug in the speakers,, nothing. 
 
Now fire it up and open the software mixer and see if those spikes return. 
If they are there , change the audio interface. 
 
If they are not there then you start adding equipment until there return. 
 
This thread is long but did anyone get you to run Latency Monitor? 
http://www.resplendence.com/latencymon
 
 
Back before I had an audio interface I noticed certain PC's or Laptops would show action  ( noise floor) if I opened Wave Lab and put it in record standby.  This is with nothing plugged in. A PC is potentually a noisey place. USB and Firewire is easily contaminated too.