Bob thanks for the insight!
Alas, you've touched on some topics I don't know much about ("round trip" and "effects send" for monitoring... so I guess I have some research to do . I know my mixer is of the Lower-End types in terms of offering many options, but I've had such great luck in the past from other boards (like my old Alesis) that I thought for certain this could handle the workload.
Do you mean that I should just use the mixer (Behringer xenyx 802USB) for monitoring instead of using the software and cpu to monitor?
Thanks again and Happy Holidays.
-Ben