I now have the latest RME drivers.  Hasn't affected Sonar, but they made some real improvements since the last time I had checked.  It has not affected Sonar start-up time.  Using ASIO drivers.  No ASIO4ALL.  Looked at the event viewer and found nothing about Sonar.  It hasn't crashed on me in a while.  It's that as long as I've ever used it - over a decade - every so often something about it fouls up and you have to restart it.
 
I've timed the startup - consistently 51 seconds.  It seems as if it's waiting for something.  Is anyone having this with X3?

You upgraded your firmware as well I hope? This is required...

Firmware is the latest version.

Do you have many plug-ins installed?
Do you have other Sonar versions installed?
Is your CPU (1 core of it) constantly working while Sonar is loading?

I do have a lot of plugins installed - a lot more than I use, especially since many of them have "stereo" and "mono" implementations and I only use the "stereo" versions
I still have X2 & X1 installed.  I haven't used either of them in a pretty long time.
There is one core that spikes and works the whole time during loading.
 
Thank you for these suggestions.  I'll work on those and report back.

Seth

Yeah, but it is just my thoughts, don't know if it will really help.

If you happen to have your Windows Default Audio Device set to also access your ASIO drivers of your audio interface, I wonder if that could slow Sonar down while it waits for access to the drivers.
 
I never have anything but my music applications like Sonar pointing to the ASIO drivers of my audio interface.  My Windows default audio device is currently set to the HDMI output going to one of my 2 HDMI TV's, so there is never any conflict.
 
Bob Bone