I like your thinking
. I read somewhere that running more than 192 kHz can be counterproductive for some DAC chips:
http://www.head-fi.org/t/588478/24-96-compared-to-24-192
The best recordings I have on my computer are 16/44.1 CD rips. As you say streaming 24/192 puts more stress on the CPU, takes longer to read from the HDD, and uses up a greater proportion of the USB 2.0 bandwidth.
Realtime upsampling increases the load on the CPU even more - some use offline upsampling (ie upsample using a pro-audio software) but not many people tend to do this unless they have a NOS (nonn-oversampling) DAC.
USB is shared, but you can use separate USB controller/root hub for your keyboard, mouse etc and thereby avoid any potential problems.
To be honest it is a shame that there are so few audiophile Firewire interfaces as Firewire has technical advantages, but maybe asynchronous USB levels the paying field...
@ Loquah The crack you are hearing is probably the audio stream restarting as necessary when settings are changed? As long as it isn't happening when you aren't touching anything I think it's normal.