Okay, slowly but surely... cutting down the buffer size fixed the latency, fantastic. Still having a lot of drop out, sometimes I can only hear the sounds I'm playing on the controller when the tracks are rolling. As soon as I hit stop, the sound stops. I can force the sound by hitting play again and then stopping immediately, but it doesn't last. It's fine while recording and plays back right, but makes it hard to rehearse a part before recording... I'll try switching out the cable, it's not really a midi cable, it's USB, but I'll have to pick up a new one that's long enough... in the meantime, if it's not a cable issue, any more thoughts?

If you are trying to add synth tracks late in a project, you may need to temporarily freeze  tracks if they have a lot of effects or bounce a temporary stereo mix and archive all the other tracks to reduce CPU load and the chance of dropouts when running at low latency.

That's kind of the opposite of what I would expect, when the tracks aren't playing and I just have a SoftSynth track open to the controller, I don't get sound... when I start the project and all the tracks are playing, when there would be more draw on the CPU, it works okay. Again, this is all very new to me, I'll keep playing with it, but I also need to get stuff done. Between takes, I'm having to mimic the sound I'm using on another keyboard and rehearse it there, then play it on the controller for the record, very inefficient.

this might be a long shot but your processor is almost 5 years old (released 5-1-2010) and while 12 GB of Ram sounds great, I suspect it's a slower speed Ram given the age of your processor.. Thus your bus speed of your PC may be slow as well. You likely don't have the newer USB ports that are faster than the 1.0/2.0 setups. With that said, you may be operating beyond the capabilities of your PC and possibly be all OR part of your problem.
 
anyone feel free to correct me if I'm wrong

Hmmm, well, it does have USB 3.0, 8 of my 12 ram are brand new, I'll bring that up to 16 when I can. Probably wouldn't hurt to upgrade the CPU and I have been thinking about it. Worth looking at I guess.

Maybe a dumb thought from someone who has had similar problems.  Perhaps an expert can send you a XXXXX.CWB file that has everything set up properly for midi.  You might be able to use that file and compare it with the setup that is giving you problems. 

That sounds interesting to me... is that a possibility? I've been able to get some work done, hopefully I'll be able to do a clean reinstall of Windows at some point... and upgrade my processor, but in the meantime, still I can usually only hear the sound the assigned to the controller when the transport is rolling, either in playback or record. Makes it hard to rehearse a part first... plus, notes get stuck in sustain.