JACK and Ardour problems

I’m having some really strange and really really irritating problems with my audio recording setup. I have an M-Audio Delta 1010 connected to my openSUSE 11.0 machine with a 2.7GHz dual core processor, 2GB memory, etc. I am running KDE4 (which, btw, is still sort of buggy; are they getting anywhere with that?). Anyway, I recall trying out JACK implementation not long after I built this machine, and I was able to get a pretty good speed; I think I had about 15msec latency, and I was able to run realtime mode. Well, now, a couple months later, nothing has changed ,but I can’t run JACK in realtime. To make matters worse, whenever I do ANYTHING while JACK is running (minimize/maximize, RECORD, move windows, etc.) I get one or several xruns. Not to mention My latency is up to like 25msec now I think. The whole situation basically rendered the recording interface unusable. What might be the problem here? I haven’t got a clue but I’m really aggrivated, because I had problems like this in Ubuntu and I thought that building a new PC and switching OSes had solved the problem.

-Dan

One update: I did realize that I didn’t have the realtime kernel installed. So I installed it and rebooted, and JACK still won’t start in RT. I also added my username to the “audio” list in the user control panel. The other weird thing is Firefox scrolls agonizingly slow when I’m in the realtime kernel, but in the regular kernel it works fine. So something’s all kinds of messed up here…

-Dan