I get this in Studio One as frequently as I ever did in SONAR. Haven't used CbB enough to compare. I disagree with the premise this is a Cakewalk issue. As others have noted, it is more likely hardware, drivers, plugins, in my own experience at least.

35mm
Just for the record, here is the message from my friend which I will share here because I think it is typical of the frustration new users will have with this bug.
 
------------------------------------------------------
Al you can stick cakewalk up your a*se
Buggy piece of sh*t
Will not let me quite the f**king program
Even when doing control alt delete and bring up task manager
It's got some sh*t going in the background
Oh f**k me doing my head in
I'm trying to be good and learn it from the top
It used to f**king work
-------------------------------------------------------

 
Hmmm, he seems like quite the lyricist. A bit 1970's though.
 
FWIW, I've had this issue from time to time. Usually opening another program that uses audio (audacity in my case) is enough to clear it.
 
IMO It's not half as irritating as the one that generates multiple crash notifications and then dumps multiple Gb of error reports onto my OS drive. That I could really do without.

35mm...
I just mentioned USB as an example. In my case disabling particular advanced "Power saving" features on USB resolved issue not related to particular USB ports. Just an idea.... Keep device manager open and when/ if Cakewalk crashes try to disable firewire driver (right click) and then re-enable it. Also, you can try disabling all "power saving" features of that driver, to run it in full power without any Win software interference. HID drivers are also pain in the butt, especially the ones on older computers (Win 7/8) that had drivers updated to be compatible with win 10.
 
The only times I remember when Sonar crashed on me (past few years) was from older plugins and when I try to "retake" (press record button) right away after deleting "take lane" without waiting 2-3 seconds.   And the USB power issue I described. 
 
Ohh just remembered... Years ago I had huge headache with Taskam interfaces + Cakewalk. And again, that was crappy Taskam unit that made life uneasy for me.  
 
P.S. Try to go to the manufacturer of your firewire chip and see if they have an update. Sometimes windows driver catalog does not pick up all updates.

Cactus Music
32 bit plug ins, don't use them. 
I have never had Sonar crash and not end the process as you say. 
I'm pretty sure that Bug is Bit Bridge related. 
 

I use 32 bit plug ins all the time in 32 bit Platinum and it still happens.

bluebeat1313
35mm...
I just mentioned USB as an example. In my case disabling particular advanced "Power saving" features on USB resolved issue not related to particular USB ports. Just an idea.... Keep device manager open and when/ if Cakewalk crashes try to disable firewire driver (right click) and then re-enable it. Also, you can try disabling all "power saving" features of that driver, to run it in full power without any Win software interference. HID drivers are also pain in the butt, especially the ones on older computers (Win 7/8) that had drivers updated to be compatible with win 10.
 
The only times I remember when Sonar crashed on me (past few years) was from older plugins and when I try to "retake" (press record button) right away after deleting "take lane" without waiting 2-3 seconds.   And the USB power issue I described. 
 
Ohh just remembered... Years ago I had huge headache with Taskam interfaces + Cakewalk. And again, that was crappy Taskam unit that made life uneasy for me.  
 
P.S. Try to go to the manufacturer of your firewire chip and see if they have an update. Sometimes windows driver catalog does not pick up all updates.

I have all power saving features disabled anyway as part of optimizing the system for a DAW. I'm not suggesting the crashes are a Cake issue as most DAW crashes are plugin or driver related for any DAW. I only have these crashes occasionally. The issue is the unkillable process which, despite how it looks on this thread, I have seen loads of others complain about in the past.
 
There's no need to disable and re-enable the driver, I just power cycle my audio interface and that works for me when I get the issue, but other users wont know that and will have to reboot the system.

Brando
I get this in Studio One as frequently as I ever did in SONAR. Haven't used CbB enough to compare. I disagree with the premise this is a Cakewalk issue. As others have noted, it is more likely hardware, drivers, plugins, in my own experience at least.

I have never had the unkillable process in other DAWs including Studio One, Samplitude, Mixbus, Reaper, FLStudio, Audition etc. I have had occasional, random crashes in them, but without the stuck process. I am not referring to the cause of the crash - as I said already crashes in any DAW are usually caused by plugins or drivers. I am referring to the unkillable process after a crash.

Me too - just had one in Studio One. In this case I attribute it to XLN Cloud Sync. I made the mistake of remaining connected (which I sometimes do as I am working on my DAW). I have AD2 loaded in a current project (not even active). I got a crash while recording multiple instrument tracks, and couldn't simply close Studio One in task manager - I had to end the XLN Cloud Sync task before I could (eventually) close Studio One.
 

I had the non-endable process problem in Cakewalk. Sonar had this problem due to my AKAI USB keyboard but that was sorted out over a year ago. In this case, I waited 30 minutes or so (actually, I did something else for a while and ignored the problem) and it finally ended but no immediate response to task manager's end-task command.

I have a script that stops the sonar task.  The active ingredient is this:

taskkill /IM Cakewalk.exe /F    <------  note: this exe is for Cakewalk by Bandlab
taskkill /im faultreporter.exe   <------  only if the fault reporter comes up

I have yet to have a crash that could not be killed this way. And a crash is either I've done something silly or a plug in.  Either way, they have been relatively rare.