Psychobillybob
Third I know its a memory leak because I have loaded it in debug mode into VS...besides the fact that whe I end "Cakewalk.exe" in taskmanager
IT DOES NOT END AND CONTINUES REGARDLESS OF RELOADING EXPLORER/ETC...
Maybe start Cakewalk.exe with Visual Studio debugger (or WinDbg) and when it hangs, check where its threads are at? You can also use Process Explorer from Sysinternals (a Micro$oft site) to see the thread stacks when the process gets stuck.
You should be able to see in which modules the threads are doing something, and even without actual debug info (PDB files) you can see some sort of a call stack, at least the DLLs the code execution takes place. Might be related to opening devices etc., since no plugins are loaded during startup. I think you can even take a debug dump of the hang-up situation and send it to Bakers...
A memory leak usually refers to a process which allocates memory or other resources but fails to free them, thus swelling up over time. Here, I think, the process remains stuck on something after having ditched the UI, but doesn't keep on eating up more memory. Well, it is sort of a memory leak in the sense that the hanging process takes up system resources that are no longer of any actual use for other processes.