Quoth J M Needham at 2008-10-22 06:17... :-) Couldn't have described my own situation any better! ... Very similar setup to mine, although I'm using Gentoo with an RT kernel. (Problem occurred with every kernel I tried.) I wasted far too much time with the same issue myself - although I didn't know that the Intel HDA was the issue at first. This is a known issue and - I believe - has something to do with interrupt conflicts. Whilst it is possible that someone out there may have this working with Jack (and a realtime kernel), I have yet to meet them. The solution that I employed in the end was to get the driver module out of the kernel entirely and use a Behringer UCA202 USB sound card instead. The only xruns that I have seen since have been due to things like new applications starting up or Rosegarden crashing (another issue entirely.) Probably not the answer that you wanted (it wasn't the one I wanted!), but worked for me. Cheers M -- Matthew Smith Smiffytech - Technology Consulting & Web Application Development Business: http://www.smiffytech.com/ Personal: http://www.smiffysplace.com/ LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/smiffy