What are those little fragments of clips I see all over my projects?

Sharke, (hey, it that e silent or what? Are you "shark" or "shark-ee"?)
I get those slivers if I use something like geist (don't you use that?) and control it via midi. Every time I press a keyboard key on my controller during record (to, say, change to a different preset), Sonar saves each keypress as a new clip.
 
Have you ever viewed events (event list Alt+8) for a track with all those slivers? Are they tied to actual midi events, or just some sort of ghosts?
 
Jes' saying, those slivers bug me too. The one's I see are legit (as described above), so what I do is lasso them and bounce to clip, so they are one familiar long midi clip.

For me it happens when a crossfaded clip is nudged. Not every time, mind you, and not in every project either. In our big live album project, this was a major headache, especially since it was a 70 minute long session with a lot of cuts over that 70 minutes...!

Came up against that one recently too. It's pretty rare for me to have MIDI timing issues like that (and I get nothing like the craziness you've had - I'd be looking elsewhere too if my workflow was that impacted) but yeah, definitely some anomalies going on for sure.

Ah yes, the "splinters" and the bane of my editing workflow in take lanes. IME, these "orphan" clips are created when any portion of any concurrent clip in any lane falls outside the swipe selection of a clip in one lane. They block the selective slip editing of other clips (depending when they are created/edited?) which is annoying and are a likely suspect for the only conditions which will consistently crash SONAR for me. 
 
In practice one tends to run with a feature until boundary conditions are encountered. I often generate 10-20 take lanes when tracking free form vox or lead instrument solos and "cross-comp" between the takes. (By "cross-comp", I mean >1 one concurrent clip with differing lengths will be selected/active.) 
 
To be fair, I can see how keeping track of so many edit complications could lead to an unstable project state given both how easy and flexible/free of restrictions it is to edit clips in take lanes in SONAR. 
 
I've tried to do this in SO3 and it does not seem to support the same degree of flexibility which might be a design choice to maintain the integrity of the project. 
 
My workflow practice includes saving constantly, deleting splinters, clearing undo history, eliminating redundant takes and moving "keeper" takes to their own track as soon as possible to cut down on the amount of active edit states that have to be maintained. Even with the additional "housekeeping" I find I am significantly faster and more productive using SONAR than an alternative. 
 
 
 

Yeah I rarely use comping and yet they're all over my projects.