Upon finally getting ProTools to install and run, more problems were noticed with the Digi002 RACK audio interface. For some reason, unbeknown to me at the time, every 30s, the 1394 Firewire light would flick on and off and ProTools would stop playing or recording (as it was obviously temporarily losing its communication). After changing Firewire cards with no luck, it was decided to replace the motherboard, CPU and RAM (a bit drastic but the PC was in need of an upgrade any way). After replacing the various bits and reinstalling Windows XP from scratch, the same problem appeared yet again!
After more head scratching, both wired and wirless network adapters were disabled and even without re-starting ProTools, the problem disappeared instantly. More research will be carried out on this, but it is probably down to the network adapters hogging the same IRQ as the Firewire interface? With the network disabled, ProTools runs brilliantly on this new machine (Dual Core 1.8GHz) - as well as any TDM system I have encountered. Even with the playback buffer set to 128 samples, the machine refuses to fall over, meaning that headphone mixes can be set up in what is perceived to be realtime via software sends. The problem with any LE system is the latency encountered which means setting up things such as cue mixes, plugins on live inputs etc., is tricky unless the playback buffer can be reduced sufficiently (as already discussed, the 128 samples option works well). The Digi002 does have a "low latency monitoring" option but this diasbles all sends and mutes all physical outputs apart from 1 and 2 meaning that creating a separate headphone mix is basically impossible. This article in Sound on Sound discusses this further by the way: http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/jun06/articles/ptworkshop_0606.htm.
Finally, the studio is becoming useable - just waiting for the monitors and contol surface.
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