Thanks Keith, that's a great resource. You should post it in the Cakewalk blog!

Thanks for the feedback.  Will use it it all to get to the bottom of this.
I've been experimenting all morning and discovered that I'm not having the "save" problem on less recent projects.  Problem may have started when Band in a Box started exporting tracks to DAW as ACID files.  For that reason I'm going to try Bristol-Jonesey's suggestion first.
Thanks again guys.  With your help I'm going to get through this!

Also, one of our developers recently had an issue where linking something that normally takes 30 seconds suddenly started taking 20 minutes!  We were baffled until I recalled that SSDs sometimes can take a long time on operations without any other noticeable symptoms.  He ran a tool http://www.hdtune.com/ and found some bad blocks.
SMART info showed CRC Error Count that needed attention and there was an Error Scan tab with a handy Speed Map button.  That stalled in 6 locations when running which seemed to be the blocks that were resulting in the 20 minute link.
 
So if you are using SSD, and are interested in free utilities to test it's health.
http://mashtips.com/ssd-health-test-and-performance-monitor-tools/
 
Care and feeding of SSDs

http://www.howtogeek.com/165472/6-things-you-shouldnt-do-with-solid-state-drives/
 
Thing about SSDs you want to minimize the repeated writing.  Also, don't run em to max capacity.  The developer in question had done that which causes less free space to be available so future writes wind up thrashing a more limited set of data blocks.  SSD firmware usually have some logic to share the wear load so the more it can load balance the better.
 
Keith

Does the project have audio snap in it?
Max

Thanks for the links Keith. My SSD is getting old enough that I need to circle back and look at those when I get a chance.

I found a free tool that gives a quick look at drive health, including SMART details, and estimated drive life for SSD.

It is available as a portable app, no need to install, just unzip and run. Most PATA/SATA, HDD/SDD, including USB supported. Limited RAID support.
http://crystalmark.info/software/CrystalDiskInfo/manual-en/ (overview)
http://crystalmark.info/?lang=en (download)

I'd check audio snap like MArwood suggested.

Larry,
 
First off these aren't endorsements by Cakewalk but merely tools I've heard of that have helped some folks.
 
I'd recommend grabbing the demo of HD Tune Pro, use the error scan tab and click the speed map button.
That will flag any slow blocks on the drive.  Several of those would indicate a drive having trouble even if an error check doesn't show anything.
http://www.hdtune.com/
 
That will just alert you to the problem but won't necessarily resolve the issue unless the scan happens to convince the drive firmware to stop trying to use those blocks.
 
For a possible short term resolution, you could use a commercial tool like GRC's SpinRite.  That does some magic to mark bad blocks and convince the drive firmware to perform much better.  Not only that but I've heard many testimonies over the years of it recovering drives from Tivo, mac hds, etc. where the device using the drive couldn't startup.  Of course it won't help if the drive has a mechanical failure, but it can definitely help to get some more mileage out of the drive before replacing it.
 
https://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm
 
Keith

Samsung has it's own monitor that is incredibly helpful as well. You can also check firmware and run regular benchmarks to see if your drive performance is dropping. It's called Magician. I use it for my 850 and 840 EVO's.
 
http://www.samsung.com/se...sd/download/tools.html

abacab
I found a free tool that gives a quick look at drive health, including SMART details, and estimated drive life for SSD.

It is available as a portable app, no need to install, just unzip and run. Most PATA/SATA, HDD/SDD, including USB supported. Limited RAID support.
http://crystalmark.info/software/CrystalDiskInfo/manual-en/ (overview)
http://crystalmark.info/?lang=en (download)

Seth Kellogg [Cakewalk]
Samsung has it's own monitor that is incredibly helpful as well. You can also check firmware and run regular benchmarks to see if your drive performance is dropping. It's called Magician. I use it for my 850 and 840 EVO's.
 
http://www.samsung.com/se...sd/download/tools.html

Seth, that's a good point. I have the Samsung tools, which I used to setup and migrate to the Samsung SSD.  Good stuff!  The other tools pointed out in this thread are all good recommendations, and I am particularly interested in looking at the HD Tune stuff.
 
But I noticed that most every drive manufacturer provides a toolset for their hardware.
 
I had looked for a simple tool to use as a "dashboard" to keep up with all installed brands, at a glance.  If you will notice the top row of CrystalDiskInfo shows the status of all installed drives. By clicking on the drive button, you will get the full page of details for that respective drive.
 
Of course, should you see any errors or otherwise suspect something is wrong, then using the dedicated vendor tools for a deep dive would be the best approach.
 
The same developer also created CrystalDiskMark, a popular free drive benchmarking tool. It was interesting to look at the before/after benchmarks for my move from HDD to SDD ... not that I needed any convincing of the huge boost in performance ... but it was fun to look at the numbers anyway.  Besides, now I have a baseline that I can check against in the future to see if things are slowing down over time ...