Windows ME and Firewire

I recently got some software to edit my digital camcorder, and with it there came a PCI firewire card. Everything works fine, but every now and then on start up my computer reports new hardware detected and asks for the firewire driver, even though it was installed and worked fine the previous session. It doesn't always do it, sometimes it boots up with no problems and the firewire port is available. Any idea why it's losing the firewire driver sometimes? Also, it may be related it may not, but sometimes when I'm using my computer having not run the new software the computer seems to be slow, and when you do a ctrl alt del there may be up to 6 programs called helpctr that have stopped responding. This seems to have only happened since installing the new software (pinnacle studio 7 if it's any help!), if I shut down all software that has stopped responding, the computer performance returns OK. Everything else works as before with no problems. HELP!!!

Thanks!