ey, everyone! I'm glad to say that thanks to a few specific people and junk (Guitarhacker, you know who you are!), I finally feel as if I'm becoming more intergrated in this community! Thanks for that, everyone!
So, right now I have a cheap lil MIDI keyboard hooked up through the usb music pack midi cable. It works, ya know, input, output, whatevs. But the problem I'm facing is a 200ms delay that really is just over the line of enough to make it hard to record through VSTi's in real-time. I have heard that 80ms or less is typically enough to not be noticed, but what are the best solutions to cut down on the delay?
 
Mind you, I'm using Win7, MME drivers (because I can't figure out ASIO), Cakewalk Music Creator 3 with a Casio CTK-496 (although specific models probably aren't are too important).

I would imagine that the config gurus here would need a lot more info to give you proper advice.

Those midi cable things are cheaply built and generally do not have the quality drivers that you willl find with a dedicated interface. ASIO drivers work really well and will get that latency down to the point that you can not detect it.... well under 10 ms or less. 

MME drivers are notorious for high latency and while you might use a work around, it's generally an uphill battle to get MME to give you good times...if not impossible. 

You need to get a decent ASIO supported interface and the problem will be solved. 

80 ms is still way too high.  A sharp eared musician can easily hear 15 ms..... so to work efficiently you want something under 10ms at the most. I think I get around 7ms with my rig....and that was default settings. 

I don't find it noticeable at 128? Let alone 64? I edit my MIDI after it goes in anyway. I have to crank it when I mix though...

ASIO shouldn't be hard to figure out; you download the latest drivers for your device and operating system, change the Driver Mode to ASIO, close and restart the program, click Options>Audio and then the ASIO panel button and set the lateccy as low as it will go without making noise. That last part is trial and error, but with your M-Audio, you should be able to set it to at least 10 ms, possibly lower.

Plus you need some good ram and cpu power don't you?

Do those midi cord things even use ASIO? 

200ms is a little more than "over the line"...I have a high tolerance for latency but even I would call that unacceptable for tracking. You need to get it down under 10ms, even less if you're playing percussive or fast-attack instruments.

As noted above, MME is slow by nature because it imposes a lot of unnecessary components between you and the sound card. ASIO was developed specifically to circumvent MME's overhead. So that would be the first step, switching to either ASIO or WDM/KS.

Once you've eliminated the MME overhead, your latency will be mostly determined by the size of the ASIO buffers and any internal latency of your plugins. The former may be reduced - subject to the limitations of your CPU - and the latter may be avoided by minimizing the use of effects until after you've recorded your parts.

It should be possible, even with a modestly-spec'd system, to get down around 5.8ms.

Omigosh. This is unreal THIS IS UNREEEEAAAAAL. There is pretty much... No latency whatsoever. I'm using ASIO4ALL, didn't know how to get it to work at first, but now...... Migosh. Thank you guys! Thanks a ton!!!

Just what I was going to say. If I did not use ASIO the latency would be terrible on my system even with WDM/KS and with ASIO it is nothing no latency because that is what ASIO does, account for latency in your system.