Manchester seems less stable for me too, at least compared to Lexington. Last week I was in Germany on a writing camp and I was working my system for literally 14 hours a day and had three crashes or so in the whole week. I updated to the last Manchester when I got back, sat down with a friend to record some backings in an otherwise nearly empty project and got three hangs within an hour, which is when I reverted to Lexington. I tried the new Manchester version today and had two hangs so far. It's like the OP says, if you wait for maybe 15 minutes it does come back but that's hardly beneficial to the creative process. I did notice that one time it mentioned Kontakt 5 crashing and I use that in some form in most projects. Superdan, do you use that at all?

Can I suggest you do the following?
load a blank project and add 1 audio track and import a long wav file onto the track and play it.
if you have no crashes then try adding a synth track with one of the cakewalk synths and play along to the wav file.
Is it still stable?
 If it is then you need to keep adding things until it isn't
If it isn't stable even with this low load then you have a serious problem somewhere. I know this sounds over simplified but if there are others using Sonar without issue then the difference is most likely your environment and not the software
 

Sanderxpander
Manchester seems less stable for me too, at least compared to Lexington. Last week I was in Germany on a writing camp and I was working my system for literally 14 hours a day and had three crashes or so in the whole week. I updated to the last Manchester when I got back, sat down with a friend to record some backings in an otherwise nearly empty project and got three hangs within an hour, which is when I reverted to Lexington. I tried the new Manchester version today and had two hangs so far. It's like the OP says, if you wait for maybe 15 minutes it does come back but that's hardly beneficial to the creative process. I did notice that one time it mentioned Kontakt 5 crashing and I use that in some form in most projects. Superdan, do you use that at all?

Yeah I use Kontakt quite a bit. This project only has 1 instance of Kontakt, and it's not super heavy intensive, just an acoustic bass by Orange Tree Samples.
 
I tried a few things that seemed to help somewhat. I reset the vs-100 to factory settings and also reinstalled the win 10 drivers. I also set the SONAR Platinum shortcut to always run as administrator. After this I was able to run for about 45 minutes until I got my first crash. I was able to restart SONAR after a couple minutes as well after rebooting my V-studio a couple times. That said, crashing once an hour is still unacceptable so I'd like to press further.
 
One thing I did notice, the SPLAT.exe process was at almost 2GB when it crashed and is using around 20% processing when it's running. Most of that is due to samples I've loaded, but the ones I have loaded aren't too intensive...maybe I have some other setting I need to look at or is that normal behavior?

Doesn't seem normal to me, as I said Lexington was running almost non stop for a week with virtually no crashes. I don't have your interface though. Still wondering if there may be a bug exposed in Kontakt since Manchester. It has never been the friendliest plugin to deal with.

I ran Manchester (Update 1) over the weekend with heavily loaded Kontakt and Omnisphere 2 instances, along with BFD3 drum tracks and had zero hangs or crashes. Also, several glitches I reported while using Kingston seem to be gone, though I haven't retested everything I ran into.
 
It is weird how each release runs differently on various machines...
 
Regards,
Dan

OK well I think I've got my problems resolved with this track!
 
Kontakt was the culprit. In doing a final mix playthrough, I noticed it was crashing at about the same point each time. I also checked in X3 and it crashed at the same point as well. So I have some questions about how to properly use Kontakt.
 
The instance of Kontakt that is causing the crashes is actually the first time I've used its multi-instrument capabilities. Before I would always load a separate instance of Kontakt for each instrument. This time I loaded two instruments, a harp and a piano into it and assigned two midi tracks to route to the Kontakt instance. This is how to properly use Kontakt right, so as not to create unecessary overhead? The only other thing I can think is that the harp part was quite busy, so maybe it just overloaded the buffer and caused an audio engine meltdown? 

Honestly I don't think it's supposed to "melt-down" at all, you're describing a pretty normal use of the plug. Good to know. I think it's probably a new bug/incompatibility in Manchester or one in Kontakt that got exposed.

superdan54
OK well I think I've got my problems resolved with this track!
 
Kontakt was the culprit. In doing a final mix playthrough, I noticed it was crashing at about the same point each time. I also checked in X3 and it crashed at the same point as well. So I have some questions about how to properly use Kontakt.
 
The instance of Kontakt that is causing the crashes is actually the first time I've used its multi-instrument capabilities. Before I would always load a separate instance of Kontakt for each instrument. This time I loaded two instruments, a harp and a piano into it and assigned two midi tracks to route to the Kontakt instance. This is how to properly use Kontakt right, so as not to create unecessary overhead? The only other thing I can think is that the harp part was quite busy, so maybe it just overloaded the buffer and caused an audio engine meltdown? 

If your midi track has a bunch of little clips, try bouncing them to larger clips. Sometimes there is data in a clip boundary that can cause issues. Also, check your event list for duplicate notes or other weirdness. If you've built the part up over several passes, and then done a bunch of editing, lassoing the clips and bouncing them to a single clip usually helps.
 
I used Manchester all weekend with new and old projects having Kontakt, Play, BFD3 and SSD4. These are not small projects, and I did not run into any issues with this release (yet, knock on wood). I did have problems with Kingston and skipped Lexington.
 
Regards,
Dan

Is Kontakt up to date with latest patch?
 
Is multi-core enabled in Kontakt?
 

JonD
Is Kontakt up to date with latest patch?
 
Is multi-core enabled in Kontakt?
 

Yes and Yes!
 
I spoke to soon apparently on Kontakt being the culprit. I loaded up the project tonight and started playblack, I then clicked on another portion of the timeline and instant crash. Back to the drawing board!
 
 
EDIT: After testing stability by freezing each soft synth, I found one instance of Dimension Pro that crashed every time I tried to freeze it. Upon inspection, one of the harp MIDI clips was inadvertently copied to it in a new take lane, so there was a ton of data being processed at once, and for a long release pad I'm guessing that put it over the top! Hopefully that really is the culprit this time!