An update for ya Doc... Been trying a number of things this morn before I have to head into work.
I read a few threads regarding something called "ASIO4ALL" saying that they were getting lower latency using that instead of the Echo drivers, so in the face of a possible reformat I decided to put it on; well low and behold the biggest most system hungry Ableton set I have (the set mentioned in the previous post) managed to get down to a very nice 7ms overall latency (that's half when compared with the Echo driver)!
The only trouble I have read about with ASIO4ALL drivers is that some outputs and inputs may be disabled, but as I am not int the studio I can't test that out. For a live situation I would see no trouble in using this driver though.
Here is the link:
http://www.asio4all.com/