irq = interrupt request. it's a signal from a piece of hardware to the cpu, saying "my turn, screw the printer, video card, etc.". for multitracking, you need to make sure your soundcard is'nt sharing an irq with another device. from what i've read, make sure your audio card is assigned an irq between 0 and 15. 0-15 are real irq's and anything further is a shared irq.
my sound was popping and clicking when trying to lay down a couple of tracks. my 1010lt was assigned irq 16 or 17......so I disabled ACPI, so I could manually assign irq's. I did'nt have to assign a new irq, it just changed to irq 5 automatically after disabling ACPI. it worked great after that.
to find out which irq is assigned to your sound card in windows, click Start, Programs, Accessories, System Tools, System Information, Hardware Resources, IRQ's.
I know..........what's ACPI? i gotta leave you something to look up.