Two more things - I removed the external hard drive (FireWire) and still got a dropout playing audio through media player.  My BIOS does not allow me to configure the interrupt number for any device.  Windows ACPI does not allow interrupt assignments either.

Even though I have the PCIe card on order, I may have found the issue.  I will have to continue testing for next couple of days.

First, the 1394 OHCI Legacy driver must be used, not the latest Microsoft driver or the Texas Instruments Compliant driver.  The latest driver will not cause a BSOD, but it is unusable - audio dropouts.  Same with the TI Compliant driver.

Second, when I used the Legacy driver before I got BSODs.  However, examination of the dump files revealed two drivers: the legacy 1394 OHCI driver, and, mozy.sys. I use Mozy as a backup service and I thought I had shutdown the Mozy service for my testing.  However, mozy.sys is still used by a process called mozystat.exe which still runs in the background even if the service is shutdown.

When I killed that process, SONAR has been running fine.  I was able to replicate a BSOD by having SONAR and mozystat.exe running at the same time. Case opened with Mozy but I don't expect a miracle - solution may be to ensure Mozy (and any of its hidden processes) is not running when SONAR is.  If the latest Microsoft driver is used, there is no BSOD caused by Mozy but it is unusable with SONAR and the FirePods due to the audio dropouts.

Last Sunday I was able to record my jazz band with 16 channels, both FirePods, with no audio dropouts and no BSODs.  Here is my summary.  I hope it will save someone else a lot of time and frustration:

1)  The latest Microsoft Texas Instruments 1394 OHCI-Compliant driver will work with a *single* FirePod on Windows 7 64-bit.  Daisy-chaining FirePods does not work with that driver.  There is probably an incompatibility issue with the PreSonus driver that is not exposed with a single FirePod.

2)  If you install the Unibrain 64-bit driver it does not work with the PreSonus driver at all (i.e. devices are not even recognized).

3)  The "Legacy" Microsoft 1394 OHCI-Compliant driver does work and it is the one to use if you are daisy-chaining FirePods.  However, this driver does not work well with other third-party drivers (e.g. my Mozy backup system) and you will get BSODs or system lockups if these third-party drivers try to access a FireWire drive using the legacy driver.

4)  Obviously I need a stable system - so this is how I solved the problem:  I purchased an additional Texas-Instruments chipset compliant FireWire card.  For the FirePods I kept them connected to card #1 which is now using the "Legacy" driver.  For the dedicated FireWire audio hard drives (which need to be backed up using Mozy) I put them on the card #2 which is using the latest Microsoft Texas-Instruments 1394 OHCI-Compliant driver.

So far this has configuration has been stable.  The FirePods work, no audio dropouts, and Mozy can still access the audio drives when I'm not recording to perform a backup without crashing my system.