[EDIT] I would recommend applying all of the normal optimization techniques before following these ideas. This is not meant to be a solution for all audio glitches, but it may help if you have done all of the usual things and still occasionally experience intermittent glitches. [END EDIT]
I can't take all the credit for this. I found the idea on the Cubase forums. Here's the thinking:
Windows or other processes sometimes can cause audio programs like Sonar to "burp" when they interrupt Sonar's processing by doing their own thing. One way to help work around that is to limit the number of cores that Sonar uses. The idea is to leave one or 2 cores for Windows, etc. to use. Some people seem to have had success with this and I'll be testing it myself.
I've created a batch file to start VE PRO and my DAW and set its processor affinity. Save the included text to a file with a ".bat" extension and double click on it to run the program with a particular affinity preset. Of course you need to change the affinity value to suit your system and processor cores. See
http://www.eightforums.com/tutorials/40339-cpu-affinity-shortcut-program-create-windows.html for more on setting processor affinity.
http://www.howtogeek.com/121775/how-to-force-windows-applications-to-use-a-specific-cpu/ will show you how to do this manually and how to check the processor affinity.
Ok, here's the batch file text. Create a text file, copy this text into it and save it with a ".bat" extension.
Hope this helps someone!
REM -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
REM Starts Sonar or Cubase and VE Pro and sets a processor affinity of 0 to 6, leaving the 8th free
REM -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
REM
REM Change the application name and path to match your installation
REM Change the affinity hex value {7F} to one of the following or roll your own
REM Affinity is a hex value based on a binary pattern where each binary digit represents
REM a single processor core starting at core 0. So 0101 would be cores 0 and 2 and 1000 would be core 3. 1111 would be
REM cores 0,1,2 and 3
REM
REM See also:
REM
http://www.howtogeek.com/...-cpu-in-windows-vista/REM
REM Samples of Hex numbers
REM ----------------------------------------
REM Binary Hex Processors
REM ----------------------------------------
REM 1 1 0 (first)
REM 11 3 10 (0 and 1)
REM 111 7 210 ( 0, 1 and 2)
REM 1111 F 3210 (etc.)
REM 11111 1F 43210
REM 111111 3F 543210
REM 1111111 7F 6543210
REM 11111111 FF 76543210
REM 11110000 F0 7654 (4,5,6,7)
REM 11000000 C0 76 (6 and 7)
REM -----------------------------------------
REM
REM put REM in front of pause to automatically hide the console window once you have your paths correct
REM -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
@echo on
REM start "Vienna Ensemble Pro x64" /affinity 7F "C:\Program Files\Vienna Ensemble Pro\Vienna Ensemble Pro x64.exe" -server
REM start "Cubase8.5" /affinity 7F "C:\Program Files\Steinberg\Cubase 8.5\Cubase8.5.exe"
start "SonarPro" /affinity 7F "C:\Program Files\Cakewalk\SONAR Professional\SONARPRO.exe"
pause