firewire ports posted by tunemaster

I have an alesis firewire 8 multimixer that has been working good for some time I unpluged it to play out the other day and now when I plug it in it won't show up on my computer I had this problem before and after pluging it in and doing a reboot several time 5-6 maybe it would come back up but not this time I have two diffrent computers both the same make and model and I have the same problem with both of them Both computers are running windows xp one has service pack 3 the other service pack 2 and has never been use for anything but recording and has never been on line so no viruses the one with spk2 has tha microsoft up date KB885222 that is supposed to fix this problem ? Not so I have tried 4-5 diffrent cables no help All the form posts I've read say to turn on the computer then turn on the mixer or it will not work this has never work since day one for me I've always had to turn on the mixer than boot up the computer or it would not work Go figure but when I first got the mixer new and it would not work that is what Alesis support told me to do and all was fine
I looked in the device manager and it says all is working fine and no yellow alerts I tried to install a new pci firewire card with 2 extra firewire ports not in the motherboard the card shows up as new hardware found but nothing pluged it to it shows up I have some other firewire devices that when pluged in won't show up either they all can't go bad on the same day ? I also have an external hard drive that is firewire and USB when I plug it into a USB port it come up fine and I can put things in and out of it If I wire it up via firewire it doesn't show up it's like windows just can't seem to fine any info form the firwire ports all the local computer experts in small town America are baffled any one got any fresh ideals any help would be COOL Tunemaster