I always had random hangs with the ASIO drivers supplied by Tascam for my US-1641; even the very latest drivers.
 
On a recommendation, I installed ASIO4All and from then on it ran reliably.
 
Recently I learned ASIO4All just wraps the WDM drivers! So I decided to try using just WDM for a while, and whaddayaknow, no problems (although I haven't checked latency, but it surely cannot be worse?).
 
So my question is: What is the point of ASIO4All? I see no advantage in using it.
 
I am now thinking of just deinstalling ASIO4All and continue using WDM directly.
 
If I do this, will I lose out on something?

You shouldn't have any problems, no. ASIO4ALL was made to be a way of disguising WDM-only hardware so that ASIO-only software would talk to it, mainly.

As well as the above it can also improve the functionality of poorly written WDM drivers

ASIO4ALL is not even a Cakewalk product so why would you lose anything?

I am now thinking of just deinstalling ASIO4All and continue using WDM directly. If I do this, will I lose out on something?

No, you won't lose anything except an unnecessary extra layer of software.

I agree with what many have said so far. ASIO4ALL is great if you have flakey or unstable interface drivers and completely un-necessary if you don't.

I used to use it all the time with an ALesis Multimix I had as the drivers were unstable and ASIO4ALL made it almost crash free. As soon as Alesis bought out some stable drivers I un-installed it.

Yea, its the Hail Marry of sound card drivers. When all else fails, try ASIO4all.
Cj

Ha!

Just as an example, I sometimes use my old laptop which only has an onboard sound card and WDM driver. It just doesn't work at all with Sonar in WDM mode (constant dropouts etc), but as soon as I installed ASIO4all it magically starting working fine! Go figure!
As others have said though, don't install it on a system with a decent audio interface and ASIO drivers - it just gets in the way.

I have a laptop with a crapola soundcard that I run SONAR on when traveling. The only way I could get it to work was by using ASIO4All. So A4A is not useless. But for any serious audio workstation with a serious audio interface it's quite superfluous. You wouldn't know this by some of the glowing reviews I've read online, which often attribute A4A with impossible capabilities such as reducing latency.