Hey ROG, I think I figured it all out. PT seems to be stable now, way beyond the point it was crashing before. I'm recording at 24/48 to my external SATA drive, which I partitioned to make another drive F for storage of finished master files (SEQ files). I have OS and PT and apps on C:

I hear you on the bit-rate thing. 16 bit can sound pretty good, and it's nice not have to do the extra step in dithering. I like to do mostly pop and rock, but I also get into the symphonic style with strings, pianos, and horns too, like film music, so I prefer the higher bit rate. With decent dithering software, it should be no problem going down to 16/44.1. I have done some 16/44.1 recording and it sounds pretty good I think, but I want to move into a higher quality.

Someone here suggested trying another USB port for the C400 interface, so I did that. I also did some tweaking with the ASIO driver and PT with latency and buffering. Rob at PG music had some good suggestions too.

Thanks to you and rharv for your help.