Oh, I'm using 64bit windows.
 

Your graphics card can be the source of trouble. Mr. Anderton pointed out awhile back that disabling any audio from the graphics card can solve a lot of strange problems.  

Audio from the graphics card. what is that?

Hi,
it would also be interesting , which kind of  hard drive you
are running. Many of the "green" , "eko" aso hard drives 
are running performance reduced, which is causing problems. 
 
regards
Pragi

mudgel
Audio from the graphics card. what is that?

some cards with hdmi allow you to use it as an audio output.

mudgel
Audio from the graphics card. what is that?

If you connect a TV or monitor with HDMI it can get an audio feed through the HDMI cable.  This is connected to your graphics card,  the card has drivers loaded that route audio through the graphics card for the purpose of feeding the HDMI link.  The intended use is for large screen TVs.  All of us use dedicated audio interfaces and professional quality studio monitors so this particular function is never (or rarely) used.
 
It has been demonstrated that removing these drivers can improve Sonars performance.   It is unlikely to be the cause of the issues in this thread, but it would not hurt to try.

None of my hard disks are green. I know the SSD is the very latest performance drive from Samsung, considered to be the leader in SSD tech. I just looked at the box for the Toshiba HD, but it wasn't helpful. It just said "Toshiba 3.5 Hard disk." However, I know for certain it's not a green drive since when selecting parts initially I chose two substandard drives based on price, and a buddy (an engineer) explained to me the bit about the green drives. Thus, I went with his recommendations, both of which were considered high performance.

Also, I'm using a Focusrite solo for playback. I'll try to disable my graphics card sound to see if it works, but it sounds like a stretch.
 

In the Nvidia control panel, all devices for sound are grayed out and listed as unavailable, which I take to mean no sound is coming from the graphics card.
 

You should probably shut off the auto update feature in Windows.