I've had some unexplained problems with dropouts - audio dropouts, but mostly puzzling midi dropouts and erratic loss of focus with softsynths. I'm thinking about doing a clean install of Win 7, then doing all the motherboard updates. Win updates, video driver updates, then start adding hardware like my Layla PCI cards, midi interface, then Sonar.
 
What is the best order I should do all these things? Like when should I start customization of Win 7, of which I have a lot, like optimizations? I'm an avid Acronis image creator and already have tons of images at different phases of a clean install already. I was thinking of stating with a clean install I did last year with X3. There is little installed besides X3.
 
My goal is to have Sonar 8.53 and Platinum, plus all the other things I have installed like Ivory, Superior Drummer, Vienna Instruments, VSampler, Finale 2012.
 
Any suggestions?

Without giving you whole list I'd especially like to suggest that there are no real Win 7 optimisations to do. Most are hangovers from Win XP days and aren't really necessary. These kind of things have brought on far more problems than they cure. I'd even go so far as to suggest so called optimisations may be the root cause of some of the problems pushing you to want to start again.

The only thing to do OS wise is just if you know what background services actually do, you might consider stopping some of those but if you are really just building a DAW then I wouldn't bother with those either.

Don't run a virus scanner during the installation of anything and when you're not on the net, don't run them at all is about as far as I go. That's been my process since Win 7, and I'm seeing more and more advice that agrees with what I've said.
Having said that you may rethink starting over and have a look at your optimisations before doing anything else.