So I found a good price on an Adaptec usb2xchange and decided to give it a try. I've heard they don't work with Xp but never actually from someone who's had 1st hand experience. I did see some guy on a French site once saying that he had the older Usbxchange communicating on a scsi chain with an E5000 and some other bits of equipment. To be honest I'm quite sure he didn't have it directly communicating with the Emu after my experience.
There are 2 big problems, firstly windows only detects the Emu once rather the 8 times as required, the main problem though is that it shows up as a usb device and not scsi, so Wavelab/Soundforge etc cannot see the adapter or your sampler.
I have an Adaptec 1480B anyway so its no big loss, its just a pain having to unplug my soundcard every time I want to transfer some samples. So to anyone whos been thinking of giving this a try on XP don't bohter, as far as I'm concerned its a no go!