Prblems with emu 1616m , tried everything...

Question

for many years I have a emu1616m on my windowx XP SP 3 desktop.
Lately i had to reinstall XP due to malware, and since then i cant run Cubase anymore properly with the emu soundcard.
My setup is very simple:
Basically all i do is : I load a mp3 into Cubase, i play a pianopart as a midifile to the mp3, and thats all. The midi Sound is generated with a extern roland sound module. There are no plug ins or software synthezizers runniong in Cubase, i use 2 audio and 4 midi tracks max.
In cubase, the ASIO is set to EMU- ASIO, direct monitoring enabled.
I already downloaded the newest drivers from the Emu site.
So this are the facts.
The Problem: The mp3 and the metronom click are not playing proberly, the mp3 is terribly scratching, with less buffer you can hear a sort of digital distortion, with more the timing of the mp3 is completely gone.
Sometimes i play with the metronome only, but then all my midi parts are playbacked TOO EARLY.
that means that i heard the audio too late when i recorded it.
I reinstalled the drivers and patchmix already three times....
My question:
What else can i do?
Is this problem likely windows XP based, or is it the soundcard? this soundcard is already 7 years old.

Answer 1

-Does the sample rate of the MP3 match the patchmix or Cubase? That distortion might be a sample-clock problem, internal versus external?... I don't know anything else,,, sorry... Make note what ver. of Cubase (VST? from the e-mu software bundle?) you use.. I had similar problems back when I used my EMU 1860m and it was the Cubase software just being flawed. I also had to rethink how I channeled my ASIO or DirectSound drivers (Whatothers there are.) It was odd to see two sets of mixers instead of there being only one. The most straight forward thing to use might be the directsound or soundmapper drivers in Cubase.