CbB on new computer setup questions

New computer = Dell XPS - i7 8700 6 core - 16 gb 2666 RAM - two 2 Tb 7200 RPM hdd's - Windows 10 - Focusrite Saffire Pro 40 & Octapre
When I hit play, I get the spinning blue thing for about a second. 
The first time I set up looping points it runs to the end of the loop and stops for about a second before returning to the start of the loop. This only happens the first time, after that all looping acts normal.
Some (not all) plugins cause gapping when assigning to a track during playback.
Is this normal behavior for CbB? I am a LONGTIME Sonar user and these behaviors started showing up near the end of Platinum for me (On my old, much lower powered computer). I do not remember any of this happening in earlier versions of Platinum. 
Any thoughts from anyone?

In addition to bumping up audio buffers as mentioned above, your HDDs may be the culprit. A couple things to try:

1. Do an "optimized" defrag of the drive containing your project audio. That will put related data closer together on the disks so that you do not get hampered excessively with seek time.
2. As you have done a new installation, go into preferences and under Sync and Caching (advanced mode in preferences), bump up the disk I/O buffers to 512 at the bottom of that page. Do not confuse those with audio buffers, they are the buffers on the disk itself for when it reads/writes to disk. I believe those still default to 256 and you want the computer to anticipate the data it needs to counter seek times.

The above would make sense for the initial pause on playback and looping, since the second pass that information would already be in RAM. The pause for adding an FX may also be related to this, but not sure.

Well, I've tried all these suggestions and nothing has changed. I also disabled SpeedStep and SpeedShift in the BIOS. I added all Cakewalk files/folders in "Exceptions" in my AVG antivirus. I'm not sure what else to try.
Am I the only one that is experiencing this? I mean, shouldn't the transport start as soon as I hit Play without a roughly 1 second pause? Shouldn't I be able to add a plugin without disturbing playback? Shouldn't I be able to expect a loop to playback without a pause the first time? I'm starting to doubt myself. (Note - All of these things work exactly as expected in Studio One but, I prefer Cakewalk!)
Does anyone have any more suggestions? 

New PCs from Dell/HP tend to come with a bunch of pre-installed junk that runs in the background.
 
Go to Task Manager - Startup, and disable everything you don't recognize.  (Be ruthless.  There is nothing there that is system-critical. You can always come back and re-enable a task if it turns out to be something you need).  Then reboot the system. 
 
If you're still having problems, download and run the free utility Latency Mon.  It will determine if anything is hogging system resources and identify what they are.

CRTL+ALT+DELETE  will launch a list with task manager on it.  

bvideo
What is your setting for Edit > Preferences > Audio - Playback and Recording -- [] Always Open All Devices ?

Bingo! Good suggestion!

I'm wondering whether opening all the Sapphire channels takes a long time. I don't know. They don't all need to be open (unless you commonly change output destinations while the transport is moving).