Can lenses interrupt initialization and cause crackles in audio?

I've been using the AVB Ultralite for 2.5 years with Platinum and I've always had the momentary audio glitch or pop, a few a week. If I'm recording an audio mix from my analog mixing console then I just back up a little and punch back in and it's fine.
 
The other audio problem I've had at times is I get some bad crackles or distortion on playback and it's constant. The fix is to open preferences and look at the audio settings and hit ok. That usually clears it up or sometimes I have to close and reopen Platinum. All of these are irritating, but not too hard to deal with.
 
But starting around 7/1/17 I started getting a far worse problem. I can record a vocalist and everything sounds fine while they're recording, but when I playback, the audio is full of crackles and it's permanently embedded in the wav file, totally ruining the whole performance.
 
 I've had input monitoring set up through the AVB mixer for 2.5 years, so what I hear on input gets routed to the output. So if something is distorting I can hear it while it's being recorded, except with this new crackle bug.
 
I've done lot's of testing is here's what I've found out. It only happens on the first recording after I opened the song. If it doesn't happen then, then it won't all of a sudden start having a crackle recording.
 
Every time it's happened, it appears that all inputs record crackles while recording. The crackles are always permanently embedded in the wav files, if I open another song and record, there will be no crackles, I can then go back to the original song and it won't record with crackles, yet the first recording will still have crackles. Or I can just close the song and reopen it and it won’t record with crackles again. So it seems to be an intermittent faulty song initialization of some sort.
 
I'm beginning to wonder if this is all caused by lenses. I started using lenses in March. I first noticed the crackle recording in July, yet I may have had some and just thought it was an anomaly. Since July I've had it happen about 5 times and then starting about 2 weeks ago I started testing every day and it's happened about 4x in 2 weeks.
 
To me it seems this is caused by a faulty initialization of the audio when first opening a song. That's why I wonder if the lenses are interrupting the initialization. I’ve also started using a custom theme in Jan 2017 and finalized it April 2017. Could that be causing it.
 
I’m still using 2017.04. I had some problems with 2017.05 and 2017.06   I know it’s possible the latest Platinum version may have this fixed, yet I keep thinking about going for 2 years with no crackle problem like this. So I’ve stuck with 2017.04 until I can get to the bottom of this.
 
I’ve not gotten any help from MOTU. It’s seems they’re pretty lame when it comes with PCs and Platinum. Yesterday I decided to turn the lens to None and see if that fixes the problem. If any one has any insight or ideas on what’s happening I’m all ears.

I'm sure (almost totally) this isn't it....but are there any cables, patch or microphone, etc that could be culprits? It sounds like some of your instances are cord free, so if you covered this my apologies I missed it. Just a thought. I've had strange things with cables through the (many 😊) years, same with others in the industry that cables are often overlooked.

Grem
What OS are you using? Win10? Didn't it just get an update recently? That may have introduced the issue.

Have you tried to uninstall/reinstall the AVB Ultralite drivers?

Have you tried increasing buffers?

Grem
What OS are you using? Win10? Didn't it just get an update recently? That may have introduced the issue.

Have you tried to uninstall/reinstall the AVB Ultralite drivers?

Have you tried increasing buffers?

I've reinstalled and updated the AVB Ultralite drivers, maybe I should try uninstalling also

 Increased buffers to 256 256
 
I'm using Win 10, but I only run the Win updates right before I install a new Plat update, so things are exactly like they were when Cakewalk created the update. I try not to introduce any variables to confuse where the problem may be.
 

I have lots of Acronis image files, so I can always revert the boot drive back to a time when things were stable. In this instance it doesn't appear to work, so I'm wondering about the lenses or even custom themes