This always happens to me. Working with Sonar, everything is great, the flow is working. Things are sounding great, editing MIDI, having fun, hit play, then boom, crash, WSOD. I've gotten used to hitting Ctrl+S after just about every change, but I still manage to lose around 5 or 10 min of work every time it happens and it completely trashes my flow. Once I transition to the audio domain, I never have a problem and don't get any crashes. It only seems to happen when fiddling with MIDI during composition. No one has ever been able to reproduce these crashes, but they happen regularly here.
I know the evangelists will tell me my sys config is wrong and I need to update my drivers, etc. but the problem has persisted across multiple driver, Sonar, and VSTi versions. Maybe one of these days I'll be able to send Cakewalk a reproducible way to trigger the issue. All I can say is, it's frustrating as hell.
I suspect there might be a pointer that's getting trashed during MIDI editing. I'm pretty much 100% convinced it has nothing to do with my audio drivers or which plugins I have loaded.
ARGH!!!
 

Heaven forbid I should turn out to be an evangelist but by your own reasoning the problems have
"persisted across multiple driver, Sonar and VSTI versions"

The only common denominator then is your computer/audio system. However you say you're 100% sure it's not drivers or plugins.

If it's not your computer system and its Sonar, can you explain why the forum has any members state that Sonar is running fine, albeit with some minor issues but nothing like you're describing.

Have you spent some time with the forum or tech support troubleshooting your problems? I'm on a mobile device so I can't see what your signature says as respects your equipment and such.
Do you want to troubleshoot the problems you're having or are you just venting. I'm sure either course is fine with the membership. On the other hand you could let us work with you to try and figure out what's happening and maybe even fix it.

mudgel
Heaven forbid I should turn out to be an evangelist but by your own reasoning the problems have
"persisted across multiple driver, Sonar and VSTI versions"

The only common denominator then is your computer/audio system. However you say you're 100% sure it's not drivers or plugins.

Audio driver is the current MOTU 424 PCI driver. The only 3rdParty plugin loaded is Trillian, everything else is std::issue Cakewalk (AD2, TTS1). Machine is optimized for audio following the Cakewalk recommendations. My box was pretty much state of the art when I built it less than a year ago. To be honest, I replaced my hardware partially as an attempt to resolve this issue.

mudgel
If it's not your computer system and its Sonar, can you explain why the forum has any members state that Sonar is running fine, albeit with some minor issues but nothing like you're describing.

Have you spent some time with the forum or tech support troubleshooting your problems? I'm on a mobile device so I can't see what your signature says as respects your equipment and such.

The only explanation I can come up with is they're not doing the same thing I'm doing. Yes I have tried to work with support, however the workflow to get there is relatively complicated and not many people have the patience to try to reproduce it. Sometimes I don't remember all the steps from zero to reproduce it, I'm not really thinking about that when I'm working. All I know is that I seem to repeat them on a regular basis. I never got a response from the forum member I sent my project file and detailed instructions on how to reproduce the problem. No problem there, I completely understand that it's not their problem or responsibility to deal with.

mudgel
Do you want to troubleshoot the problems you're having or are you just venting. I'm sure either course is fine with the membership. On the other hand you could let us work with you to try and figure out what's happening and maybe even fix it.

Probably a combination of both, it doesn't happen all the time, but it's freaking annoying. I would prefer to resolve the issue.
 

To get some reasonable suggestions, please define what you mean by "WSOD". Significant is either you just get Sonar freeze or global windows crash.
 
In no way Sonar (or any other user level program) can ever crash Windows, by design. That does not mean Sonar can not trigger something in the drivers and/or hardware which crash then, so we can try to find that.
 
In case only Sonar is crashing and Windows is still in tact, that is a different story. Again, that does not mean that something in drivers is not triggering something in Sonar, and we can try to fight with that.

azslow3
To get some reasonable suggestions, please define what you mean by "WSOD". Significant is either you just get Sonar freeze or global windows crash.
 
In no way Sonar (or any other user level program) can ever crash Windows, by design. That does not mean Sonar can not trigger something in the drivers and/or hardware which crash then, so we can try to find that.
 
In case only Sonar is crashing and Windows is still in tact, that is a different story. Again, that does not mean that something in drivers is not triggering something in Sonar, and we can try to fight with that.

WSOD is an application level crash, not an OS level crash. Windows intercedes and tells you the application has stopped working. When that happens the application window turns white, thus WSOD. It's a Sonar only crash.

It would be really cool to get to the bottom of this and pin the blame either on Cakewalk or my machine. Other than minor annoyances with the staff view, this is the only real issue I've had with Sonar. I just keep getting nailed by it.
Personally, I think Sonar has a bug, but I haven't been able to prove it yet. The golden rule is: "Thou shalt not crash".
 

Tom, have you checked your power line?  I had similar problems for years and it persisted even when I had a high quality power conditioner/back up power supply.  Since running a new line to my cottage chronic crashes are a thing of the past... and I can't begin to estimate how many computers/time/expense I went to trying to make things stable... an old crappy power line turned out to be the problem

Just a thought.
 
I have had a few WSOD's and on occasion, it has resolved itself just by giving it a bit of time to sort itself out.
This is NOT a panacea and doesn't work all the time but can work so, the next time it happens, go & make a cup of something and check again after 10/15 minutes.

I had occasional crashy behavior and couldn't believe my interface had anything to do with it.  I had used my trusty Delta66 without problems for so many years.
 
I finally replaced the Delta with a Tascam USB interface (16x08).  I'm only a single ms slower RTL and haven't had any of the mysterious poof! moments since then.
 
Hopefully you can get things sorted out.  From P8 thru S-PlatD (minus X1 & X2) I've never had a better experience running Cakewalk DAW software than I'm having right now.  It's worth it - hang in there and try everything even if you're sure whatever-it-is isn't a problem.

Power line is something hard to test till you have special equipment or at least some UPS. But that direction can be checked by running some "burn in" programs for several hours, like https://www.raymond.cc/blog/test-system-stability-by-putting-heavy-load-on-system-resources/
 
But you can check other parts. I will start with excluding external components. I mean remove all Control Surfaces and use other audio card (internal for example) if you can, or at least switch to other driver model (WDM in case you use ASIO). The idea is that once you get a crash, you know that all components you are NOT using had no influence on the problem.
Also think of something you are always using in the crashing projects. Can be some external VST, internal VST (ProChannel), ARA, etc.