Matrox RT.X100 Xtreme Pro (and bundled Adobe Premiere pro 1.5) problems

I was referred here from a member at StorageReview.com. Just from browsing the forums, I can see that there is a wealth of knowledge to obtain here. From the get-go, I want to admit that I have little experience with DV or Adobe Premiere. I was just helping a friend who has a local production company do an upgrade, but I am trying to assist him with these issues. (If this is too long of a post, please forgive me because I am trying to be as detailed as possible)

I did an CPU (P4 3.0e), mobo (ASUS P4P800SE w/ chipset Intel 645PE), generic Intel cooling certified case, and capture card (Matrox RT.X100 Xtreme Pro). I chose the mobo and processor off of Matrox's site, and I installed the capture card as specified.

The pressing issue at hand, is with dropped frames in Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5. Sometime last year when he was using a Athlon 2400+, a Pinnacle (not sure which model but it runs for $1000) capture card, and Adobe Premiere 6.5, he purchased 3 external hard drives from Maxtor a couple a months between each other. They were two 250GB and one 500GB drive that are all connected through USB2.0. However when pulling files from these drives, he did not experience the dropped frames. However, Matrox has insisted to him that the external drives do not keep the constant speed needed for Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5. If that is the case, he already has two 120GB Western Digital drives internally, and I will just add another. If there is another issue that anyone has ran into with external drives, would you please share it.

Another problem I ran into (though it is not nearly as important as the first) was with his Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 card. Aparently it does not have an ASIO driver to work with Premiere or Audtion. I can preview .wav files in selected channels, but in any chosen export format it reverts back to playing in all 5 channels. After doing a little browsing, I think I've discovered that only the Audigy line of Sound Blaster cards have this ASIO driver, but please correct me if I'm wrong.

Once again, sorry for the long post. Thanks in advance for any info that can be given, and if this needs to be placed into another forums please let me know. Once again, AWESOME site.