usb n firewire drop out / audio nightmare

hey i have a two week old aurora r3

the usb and firewire ports seem to switch themselves on and off briefly every few minutes.

I had linked up an alesis multimix usb 2.o and after a few minutes of playback a distortion and clipping would start.

drivers/firmware and bios were all checked as were usb cables/ports/monitors/headphones etc.

this was replace with a firewire focusrite saphire 14. same problem.

then a lexicon omega. same problem.

this is with playback through zune, never mind multi track recording etc.

all latency settibngs were tried as were asio drivers etc.

then playing guitar through amplitube 3 i noticed the connection to the outboard sound is being lost via usb every minute or so. comes back a second later, but thats no use to listening to never mind recording.

i checked all power settings, and everythibng is set to peformance, nothing is going to sleep on the side.

any ideas ?

broken usb and firewire controllers?

just an inability to use alienware aurora with out board sound?

will be going back if thats the case...

any help appreciated