If You Can Answer This, Then You Are The Audio Gur, FW 101 eating up seamingly CPU Options

[red_books]

i have a dual 1.8 g5 tower with 3 gigs of ram running mac os 10.3.9. im currently recording/producing an album and a soundtrack for an indie film. i recently bought an edirol fa-101 so i'd have a high quality recording interface. everything was working pretty well for a little while. now, whenever my edirol is on it eats at my reason cpu meter. i watch the meter as im in reasons soun preferences. when i click back on my internal audio (default) as the main out put my reason cpu usage bar drops to nothing, like it always used to. right when i click my edirol back on as the main out, it jumps more then 5 bars and clocks out on songs that used to be a breeze. reasons stops and tells me i have too slow of a computer, my eye twitches and i lose more hair. also, all the files i was working on with revision cause i needed something with a video track that has rewire (dont really like logic, love ableton live) while working on soundtracks no longer play properly. everything now plays in a highter pitch, but when i close both programs and open the original reason file its all ok and plays how it should. im really trying to figure out whether its my os (which i just recently re-installed), my computer (mayber theres something bad goin on under the hood), etc. i really have no clue. all i know is that ive invested over 7 grand in a computer, sound system, etc that is just plain not working. anyone? anything?

[lancet]

use the Audio midi set up to verify that both the edirol and built in audio are default to the same bit rate /sample rate.

make sure reason is the same also..

the OS probably won't do that.
a broken computer probably won't do that either.

btw. i'm no guru..