16bit
i had the same problem tonight with my guitar port, the solution that i found was i had to change (in track properties) the recording settings to 16bit instead of 32bit, that fixed it right up, the port only goes 24bit max, but cool edit only shows 16 or 32, which i think sucks cause you have to use 16 instead of 24 but whatever. It was doing the same as what you described. this was after a recent format so im guessing cool edit just defaulted the port to 32bit after i reinstalled it.