Help: SB live 5.1 line in probs

Can anyone help please - sorry if this is a bit long.

I have a SB Live! 5.1 'Digital' card - full boxed original. I am trying to
transfer LPs to CD.

I first record the LPs onto minidisc using a Sony hi-fi unit (downstairs,)
edit as necessary there, then take the disc to my PC (upstairs) and play
them into the line input of the sound card from an Aiwa portable MD. I
usually 'record' then onto the PC using Steinberg Clean V4 - but this is
where I find problems.

The music from the MD is clearly going into the card as it comes out again
on the speakers at 'normal' volume - the volume and line-in on-screen level
adjustments work perfectly. However Clean does not register any sound and
records silence - at least now.

When I first tried this process the incoming level seemed low. I closed
Clean and opened Cool Edit 2, and the sound level came up somewhat (a good
10dB). When I closed Cool Edit and reopened Clean, the level there had also
risen a similar amount.

I copied a couple of discs but when I came to play one of them back there
was noticiable distortion on one disc (which had a higher original level.)
When I looked at the waveform of the track using Cool Edit I could see it
had gone into limiting - presumably I was driving the line input of the SB
too hard. I want to re-record the audio track onto the PC, but the displayed
sound level has dropped out of sight - Cool Edit does not show anything down
to 66dB below peak - and I cannot find out why. There have been no hardware
changes since the original recordings, and other than the latest 5.1 drivers
no software changes either (the problem occurred before the new drivers were
activated.)

I am using an MSI 848PE motherboard with a Pentium 4 2.4GHz and 512Mb RAM.
The on-board sound on the MSI is disabled and it's drivers are not loaded. I
run McAfee V8 anti-virus and Zone Alarm firewall, so I doubt it will be
anything external.

In addition to Clean and Cool Edit I have PowerDVD V3, Audiograbber 1.8,
Easy CD CD-Da Extractor, Winamp 3 and Windows Media Player V9 on the system
but inactive. If it is of any consequence I also have problems the I
cannot get Winamp or WMP to play music CDs - they will play wav and mp3
files, but not cda. WMP says it cannot find the file although it shows the
tracks, Winamp shows track lengths in thousands of minutes but does nothing
when invited to play. Curiously Audiograbber plays them perfectly.

Any ideas gratefully received - I'm getting pretty desperate!


--

Woody