I've got a lot of open questions about ASIO, including one interesting one: will it knock out other apps and can this be avoided? Finding this out has been on

I've got a lot of open questions about ASIO, including one interesting one: will it knock out other apps and can this be avoided? Finding this out has been on my to-do list forever, but I'm visually impaired and many of my users will ultimately be as well, so I can't have it just killing the assistive technology. I'm not sure how that fixes the higher channel count problems with PortAudio anyway. If you've got more info, I'm open to it-I'd love a solution to fall from the sky.