Charles, Do you mean from a terminal startup pd and jack with sudo or to actually log on to the system as root from startup? I don't know how to do that besides running the recovery startup. Linux has changed in the last 15 years. I did try changing the runlevel of the timers and sound card IRQ as well as adding myself to the sound group on another installation and still had the same problem.
Bernard, I guess I should have said performance is better on vista than puredyne with said latency settings. I did not actually measure latency. The audio does not drop out with latency set at 50ms on vista but does with puredyne. 2.6.31-9-rt is the kernel i'm using. Yes 50ms is bad for rt performance that is why I'm trying to get this working with linux. It is impossible it seems with vista to get the latency any lower. It is crazy 10 years ago latency was not an issue with 10 times slower machines. The current processor is an AMD Sempron LE 1250 at 2.2GHz.
Thanks and Thanks