i was wondering how it would affect my XSKey and authorization if i reinstalled logic... i am thinking about erasing my whole hard drive and starting over... something strange has happened

It will be fine, as long as you have the authorization codes for everything. It should work with OS9 or OSX. What strange thing has happened......Just Logic, or everything on your hard drive?? OS9 or X??? Sometimes just running a disc utility like TechTool Pro or Drive 10 will solve the weirdness, or tell you whats going on.

well, yesterday i bought a presonus firestation. they are not ready for osx yet, so i was going to go back to 9 for a little while. i booted into 9 and installed logic. the first strange thing that happened was when i pressed the eject key, my built-in dvd rom drive opened and my external cd-r drive ejected. i thought that was not too big of a deal and that i would just work around it. then i was going to change the appearance, because it was on the default one and i dont like both scroll arrows being at the bottom of my windows. when i opened the appearance control panel, my hard drive started making a strange, loud sound, and the computer would not respond to any other commands. it took awhile for the control panel to open. i decided i would use norton disk doctor to see if anything was wrong, and if i could fix any problems. in the middle of the disk scanning, a dialogue box came up that said, "unexpected error occurred, cannot continue scanning disk, please try again." so i hit stop on the disk doctor screen, and my hard drive started making the weird sound and nothing would respond. it did this for about 15min, and then i just hit the reset button on the front of my g4. eventually, i just booted back into osx to see if it acted weird, and it didnt seem to. so i just shut down my computer.

would it be bad if i had my computer sitting 6" away from my makie 800 watt power amp?

mellotron before you do the clean install, gather every authorizer codes because you'll need to fill in after you are done.
I know it's a pain, but when all else fail to solve problems it's the last resource.

Is OS9 & X installed on the same hard drive? Having 2 hard drives helps when having weirdness like that going on. You can run all the diagnostic tools from the drive that is behaving properly. It makes backing-up easier too in a situation were the drive needs to be reformated. If its making alot of noise it could be something terminal.
The timing of this happening after installing the firewire device and Logic leads me to believe that something is conflicting with the firestation. Un-plug it and start-up in OS9. If it behaves, open the driver cd-rom for the firestation and read the read-me file.......check the install procedure....if there is any warnings or OS requirements for the device.

well, i actually went ahead and reformatted my hard drive. it fixed my problem, but now i am having problems with the driver/software that installed to make the firestation function. all these problems makes me remember why i went to osx. i have not had a problem since i switched to osx. its just that the firestation is not compatible with osx yet, and if i did not buy it now, the price would have gone up. since i have it i thought i would use it for a few projects i have to work on in the near future, but i dont think that is going to happen.