For weeks I have been struggling with what seemed to be random crashes with Foxboro.  To the internet I went to read all the horror of those of us who live in the nether regions of Crash World, hoping to spy a flicker of light in the darkness.  I pulled out my ninja hacker chops, fired up procdump and windbg, sleuthing as the most desperate of us must.  But to no avail because Sonar was crashing in that "not responding way", thus the dumps were essentially not helpful.  And, beaten down and crawling low I opened a ticket with support, hoping for a sip of wisdom.  But alas the sun had passed the zenith and I must wait yet more.
 
So tonight I took the brute force approach and went into comparative safe mode ... mode.  And lo, I found that I could crash the truculent project in BOTH Splat and X3.  Hmmmm.  And then the Puter Gods smiled on me and, by many repetitions of isolating plugs in safe mode, I found the crash was coming from ONE SPECIFIC INSTANCE of ReMatrix.
 
The step to repro was simply to hit play, and then click around on the timeline to get the song position to pop around - this would cause an instant screen freeze, ultimately leading to having to kill the Sonar session.
 
The specific preset is called Real Big which is in the Big Venues collection for ReMatrix.  I found at least one other in that collection that also causes the crash - there may be more.  Changing the preset to something outside the collection did NOT cause a crash.
 
I already have a ticket open with support - all the discovery above was after I already began that dialog - so we will see where it goes.  I just wanted to report an issue with ReMatrix in both X3 and Splat.
 
The moral of the story is, a lot of times it's something on our own box that is blowing up Sonar and we just have to keep on pulling at it to unravel the issue.
 
I will sleep much better tonight.  Cheers All !
 
Steve

Glad you got it sorted. You're right too that many an errant Sonar is actually down to a misbehaving plugin.
 
I would report the issue to Cakewalk again even though you found the cause and have previously made a report. Perhaps they can check ReMatrix because it is a special case plugin being how its ProChannel only. Rematrix only cam with the current version of Sonar so perhaps its not meant o be working in X3 and blowing up because of some limitation but still worth reporting again from my mind as you now have a clear recipe.
Having posted the recipe here maybe there's others who can replicate the problem though I don't remember a heap of Rematrix problems. All the best

Really glad you got it sorted - well done for the sleuthing.  I know it can be very frustrating.
 

mudgel
Perhaps they can check ReMatrix because it is a special case plugin being how its ProChannel only. Rematrix only cam with the current version of Sonar so perhaps its not meant o be working in X3 and blowing up because of some limitation but still worth reporting again from my mind as you now have a clear recipe.

 
I'm guessing he has the full version by the preset names.

It would be awesome if Cakewalk could have Sonar isolate the problem and show us in plain english (or your preferred language) that plugin "X" is causing "Y", and will be disabled. No crash...
 
Hmmm, that sounds like a feature request...
 
Regards,
Dan

Would it be like the 1D 10T error?

Lol, no. More useful than that, I'd hope.

Regards,
Dan

Just an FYI - the only real freeze I've had with Platinum was when REmatrix wanted to load an impulse that wasn't in the impulse folder because I had swapped out IR response files while testing. 

Yeah, I should have stated this was on a full version of Rematrix and the instance was on a stereo bus. Gonna make super-minimal project when back home tonight and see if it behaves differently on track and/or on bus with/without audio in the stream.
And FYI I sent cake all my findings as addenda to the initial ticket.
Cheers.

Exception error handling would be awesome, but requires a lot of programming to intercept what would go to Windows to kill an app. It often falls into a "last thought nicety" many times unfortunately.

Well.... stumped now.  Created new project with just an instance of Superior Drummer 2 and a midi track.  Placed Rematrix with the offending preset into both the track and alternately a stereo bus.  Could not repro crash.  Maybe there is some correlation to the overall load on the audio engine (because the real project is ginormous).
 
At least I can work on the real project anyway by avoiding that preset there.