Lots of dropouts

 I know this is a common issue for people, but I haven't experienced it much until now. I have a dozen or so EastWest instruments and half a dozen vocal tracks (4 takes each, so 24 vocal takes in all) plus a couple regular Midi tracks. Many times when I hit Space to play, I hear a quick loud pop, then only then Midi tracks play. I will do it a few times, and eventually there are no pops and the EW and audio tracks play. Also, whenever I add a new EW instrument, or connect one that already exists, I get a blue message saying the audio engine dropped out unexpectedly. I do have a smattering of effects on some of these tracks, and when I bypass all audio effects, it plays fine. (All effects are out of the box, Sonitus EQ mostly.) I am using ASIO drivers on a new, clean computer. I understand I'm taxing the machine to process all this and that's causing the failures, but my old machine had a slower processor, a less RAM, and a lot of crapware in the background, and I never had this problem for projects of the same complexity. 
 
I suspect the culprit lies in some Preferences settings I had in the old version, ,and now that I'm running a new install, I don't have those settings anymore. Using the dropout troubleshooting guide on the Cakewalk site I have messed around with Playback I/O Buffer Size and Mixing Latency, but since i'm writing this, obviously they did not make a difference. Or I should say they seemed to at first, but shortly after a few successful runs, I get the same problem with the same frequency. Why might this be happening on this much faster beefier machine?

Thanks. The question is why am I having this problem on this new better computer, when I never had it on my old crummy computer with projects of similar complexity?

Oops! Thank you for reminding me to update my profile info!! See accurate system info below...
 
Also, I forgot all my old settings are there in my profile! I just matched them and saw the Playback and Recording Driver Mode was set to MME, so I switched it to ASIO. Having no idea what that means, is that going to make any difference?