I'm giving up on this. I've done a lot of research and the problem boils down to a sub-standard 1394 chipset in my brand new Dell laptop. I am pissed. I even tried a Belkin express card with a TI chipset and it doesn't work either. I also downloaded a DAW called Reaper and tried Reaper. For some reason Reaper does see the signal but because of the Ricoh chipset in my laptop, the signal drops and reconnects interrmittently. It worked long enought to record a test signal but then it started to act up. I also found that my desktop workstation has a TI chipset and the interface works fine with Sonar. This problem also appears to be industry wide in terms of firewire audio devices so I don't think there is any fix for any firewire device. I sent an email to Art about their Firetube 8 channel product but, of course, no response. This is a ridiculous situation and there are many, many unhappy folks our there because of it.

I guess my next step is to uninstall Cubase from my laptop and put it on my desktop. This really sucks.