[Solved] ASIO Popping and Latency problems

I was having issues with popping at buffer sizes < ~20ms which was totally unusable for live monitoring but after a LOT of troubleshooting I solved the problem and thought my solution might help someone else. First I assumed it was an issue with VS (possibly being 32bit on 64bit windows) so I installed X2 (64bit). When that didn't help I disabled/terminate every non-essential device, process, service or windows feature (Aero, etc.). Nothing helped. I changed from 24/96 to 16/44.1 and the issue actually got worse, other bit/sample rate combinations were no better. Thinking all hope was lost I was about to box the thing up and try to sell it to someone who didn't need a low-latency interface, but I noticed as I was unhooking the USB cable that I had it plugged in to one of the USB3 ports on my computer. I didn't think it would help but decided to try the USB 2 port in stead for one last stab in the dark. I popped in to Sonar and just for grins set the ASIO buffer size to the smallest possible value (~3ms input, ~4ms output latency @24/96) and was blown away by perfectly clear playback. Plugged my guitar in and was able to live monitor perfectly, no popping, no latency. I jammed in a bunch of effects on several tracks and it was still perfect! So moving from the USB 3.0 port to the USB 2 port solved the issue immediately. Both the USB2 and 3 ports are from Intel controllers, though I'm not sure of the specific configuration (if one is integrated into the chipset and the other is attahed via a secondary controller on another bus). Hopefully someone finds this information helpful. Here's my system specs (it's a high-end Sager notebook): CPU: i7 2860QM RAM: 16GB ddr3 HDD: crucial m4 512GB ssd Video card: Radeon 6990m Intel HM65 chipset motherboard