optical-optical recording

The only sound "card" that's optical that I have is a realtek AC97. I've always found creative to be superior with bass compared to anything onboard and most other brands. Anyway...

1) Am I going to lose bass if I'm recording straight from an optical source to the optical input?

2) Do I still have to worry about the waveform clipping, or does optical mean it pretty much adjusts itself?

Optical to Optical means a digital connection. Nothing is lost or altered when transferring from one device to another using a digital connection.

Unless you have some really wierd sound card or recording software [edit] that forces a conversion to analog and then back to digital [/edit], the original audio being transferred sould be copied straight to the hard disk. No digital to analog to digital conversion sould be performed, so regardless of how crappy your sound card may be, the end result wont be any different from a top of the line sound card.

Correct, It's all digital, unless you have a really crappy cable/or software to record there shouldn't be much difference.