I have been experiencing just about every single condition described in this thread. First I crashed and then I wasn't able to restart again. I literally spent days on the sofa just waiting for my internal processes to end the gridlock. Then I realized I had been drinking to much alcohol and learned to live with it... More relevant perhaps is that my Sonar has been having the same hiccups. With and without any midi connected. In the end it happened every single time I quit Sonar... AARGH... I couldn't believe it for the longest time or at least for an hour or so but dstrenz's sollution: turn off "Show midi activity on windows taskbar" in the global options seems to have completely eliminated the problems. I'm so happy. It might even have saved my liver. Not only am I not getting the hangups anymore but closing a project or the entire program is actually faster now. Also, my angry neighbor actually said hello today... Thank you dstrenz and everybody else for having this problem (or something related). And thanks to Cakewalk for sticking with a feature that has been causing problems since version one of their product. The exhilarating feeling of joy experienced through solving a problem is only possible if that problem exist in the first place.

Unfortunately, I've had the pleasure of using this "fix" several times over the past few days. Sonar has locked up at least three times on me, and unplugging my USB MIDI adapter seems to be the cure for unlocking it. My new E-mu sound card has MIDI inputs. I should probably switch to those and see if the problem goes away.

Same problem here. Someone says it's a midisport driver issue, and that's what I have. I'll try the unplug USB connector trick next time Sonar crashes--which unfortunately, happens only too often.

Your issue with the USB devices is that when Sonar hangs or crashes, Windows shuts off power to the USB hubs (Windows does this by default). Unfortunately, Sonar's still considering the device as active.

How to prevent this;
Go into device manager and right click on a USB hub to bring up its properties. Under power management, uncheck anything that's checked. Repeat for each hub and reboot.
Fixed.

ew

LOL, Ducky...

BTW, folks, since my original post here I noticed something interesting...Sonar crashed recently but SONARPDR.exe didn't hang on. My MIDIsport 2x2 was plugged in but my GR-33, which is connected to it, wasn't on (I notice when the GR-33 is on the MIDI in light is constantly going). Maybe this has something to do with it. If so--turn the synth off and on again, or unplug and re-plug the 2x2? Which is better? Is either likely to harm anything?

I want to thank all the great suggestions to fix the "kill sonarpdr.exe" issue. Even though I hardly ever have crashes, I have suffered from the kill issue for a while. The removal of the MIDI monitor did it for me finally. Prior to that (hopefully) permanent solution, I tried the suggestion to unplug the USB MIDI device (in my case 2 MOTU Express 128's through a hub) and it did kill off the hanging process.

I don't think this is a problem ascribed to any specific USB MIDI device or SONAR exclusively, but an issue (as mentioned elsewhere) of processes waiting on each other to terminate.
At least I got a fix - thanks everyone !

I don't know if this has been mentioned, but just in case:

Though I have the MIDI monitor turned off my rig will still hang on crash. And hot-plugging my devices is just not an option - too much work really.

So from you Windows Task Manager | Shut-down use Ctrl-click to turn off your machine. This will instantly kill any running processes and power you down. I assume since it's the OS killing the constipated processes its probably as safe as can be considering. But it works.

Thanks Puffer. This is what I'm currently doing, and waiting patiently ... someday, someone will really look into - I bet it's not SONAR's fault at all.