On a larger project, autosave halts work for several seconds even on a pretty powerful computer.   Is it possible that this is the reason for some of the odd behavior I and others notice in platinum?     For instance, if a "paste special" into a large number of tracks happens to come exactly as the autosave is occurring?   The paste can't happen after autosave starts, but can autosave start during the paste? 
 

I don't think it can. And the best way to determine if autosave is the culprit or not is to disable the feature for a while.

I really believe that autosave causes a lot of my crashes (which are not often, but do happen during a 100+ hour work week).  No way am I going to work without autosave.  But I see no difference between X3 and Platinum as far as autosave.

Not seeing a problem, of course, isn't saying it doesn't exist.   But I turned off auto save (and turned ON a mental reminder to save save save ) and have had no issues at all in a heavy work session ...

I think it's really difficult to make autosave perfect.
I have it turned off since I don't know the principles for it.
 
Reaper has these options for autosave - "when not recording", "when transport stopped" etc.
Would be nice to see in Sonar too.

I have never relied on auto-save - I just always save before performing any significant action, and if committed to the outcome of the action, will save again.
 
And I will make a backup copy of the project folder if I am going to be making a lot of changes to the project.
 
Bob Bone
 

I remember reading a while back that Autosave only kicks in when the system is idle - which is exactly as it should be.

williamcopper
On a larger project, autosave halts work for several seconds even on a pretty powerful computer.   Is it possible that this is the reason for some of the odd behavior I and others notice in platinum?     For instance, if a "paste special" into a large number of tracks happens to come exactly as the autosave is occurring?   The paste can't happen after autosave starts, but can autosave start during the paste? 
 

Yes with your virus scanner.