About 2 years ago or so I spent many rounds with Waves support because controls in Q10 would move by themselves. There never was a resolution but at some point it stopped happening. At the time I decided it must have been my mouse driver. Did drive me crazy though.
On this Element 2 issue I decided to try stripping down the project and remove all my bus framework that my default template has but I was surprised to find that after I did that, the clip would play.
So I narrowed it down to having T-Racks Stealth Limiter in the project. If the Stealth Limiter has the Inter Sample Peak Limiter set at x16, SONAR's audio engine will stop. Any other setting and the clip plays through. Now for the crazy part, it doesn't matter if the T-Racks Limiter is in the audio path or not. If I feed Element directly to my sound card but have the limiter on a bus that is receiving no sounds, the audio engine still stops.
If I add Stealth Limiter to the project in Reaper, the sound breaks up and distorts (which seems kind of odd since it's not peaking on any meter) but the audio engine doesn't shut down and it doesn't crash.
Which makes me very confused.
Doesn't seem to matter if the Element UI is open or not, though it's GUI could easily be at fault. And of course requiring another plugin be present in order to get a bug to happen pretty much means no one will look at it.