I'm what you might call a very sporadic user of Sonar, as my interest in making music varies, but recently I started recording again and using my Sonar X3 and had some issues with crashing. I removed every Cakewalk related folder (including old Music Creator files) ,reinstalled and the crashes stopped, but I still found the software buggy, so I upgraded to Sonar Artist and now the program started freezing again and since I can't see that the bugs that were annoying me has gone, I'm considering either cancelling my Artist and going back to X3 or removing it and do a clean Artist install. Anybody have any experience with these freezing ? Is there a log that can find the reason ? Obviously it's annoying to have to redo the work after a crash.

because sonar is so demanding on your system I would first rule out a HD issue.
when HD's are on their way out they often freeze up.
 
once you illuminate that, I would look at 3rd party plug ins, using any ?

Thanks for your input. Sonar is installed on a SSD disk and that was performing fine with X3. I have downloaded some VST synths but none was used in the project that kept crashing.  My CPU does run a bit on the hot side andI don't know if that can be the cause.

Is there are audio interface involved other than the chip on the motherboard? Maybe some details about the hardware and OS would be helpful.
 
Are there plug-ins other than the ones bundled with SONAR involved?
 
If you are running 64bit SONAR are there any 32bit plug-in in use?

I have a an OK new motherboard with an AMD FX processor. I use an AKAI EIE for sound. I have a 64 bit system and I use some 32 bit VST's like Cakewalk Sound center, but these have never given me troubles in the past.
 
I just had a crash and for the 2nd time the undo function did it. I have 2 types of crashed. One where the system becomes unresponsive, usually after an edit function and one where Sonar informs me that it crashed and enables me to send a crash report, usually after opening a project.