I have the same issue. I have an MBox2 Pro connected via firewire on Leopard and I get kernel panics consistently. It is infrequent enough to not do a lot of harm, but enough to cause concern, inconvenience, and loss of work.
I have hard drives daisy chained after the audio interface connection, and occasionally when I read/write data on those FW drives it will KP. 10.5.3 update did not fix it, nor has any other. It doesn't even happen less frequently after the update.
This is absolutely ridiculous. It seems like a hardware issue to me because of its consistency even after many updates by many users. If it were a software issue, they either haven't addressed the issue yet, or they suck at addressing the issue.
Personally, I think they know damn well what they are doing and refuse to bite the bullet and say, "Hey, it's a hardware issue and we need to recall and replace components". I'm not looking forward to that, but if it were the case at least they could stop being so secretive about ****, and assure us CUSTOMERS that they are taking the bull by the horns and looking to effectively rid this issue of their products.
Seriously, wtf? What COMPANY sells you something faulty, and you complain of issues, and they give you no reassurance what-so-ever of addressing the issues. At least tell us you are taking care of it. ****ing douche-bags.
Although, Leopard has been buggy for some time and many users and AI (audio interface) manufacturers claim that Leopard is the issue and not hardware. I hope it is a software issue and not hardware. I have heard of hardware based FW issues in the past pre-Leopard and I hope they have fixed those.
Let's hope an update solves this problem soon. At the very latest I assume it will be fixed (if it is indeed software) with Snow Leopard in 2009.
At this point I, and for many others too, do not have the option of sending in ANOTHER product to have it fixed by them because they can't do their jobs right. It costs me time, money, and not to mention how important a computer is in this day and age. Especially, audio engineers, musicians, and recordings engineers.
FIX YOUR ***** APPLE