Mr. Anderton has been recommending updating ones graphics card drivers. It can't hurt. I do it when ever a new driver is out. 

Removed all plugins from search path, did not have an affect...

Try a reset and rescan in the plugin manager.

Two things to try (for troubleshooting):
 
1. Switch to WDM mode and do not use your RME device. Instead choose your onboard soundcard. Now load your project and test the same scenario changing screensets and see if the lag persists.
 
2. Make sure that your screensets that you save and switch to do not contain the media browser. To do so undock the browser and close it prior to saving the screensets. Then retest loading the screensets and see if there is a lag.
 
On some systems that have the floppy disk controller enabled or if you have network mapped drives, this takes a long time for the browser to initialize causing the delay..
 

Removed video card and running from on-board vga.  Same problems.  This should eliminate video drivers as culprit.

Noel Borthwick [Cakewalk]
Two things to try (for troubleshooting):
 
1. Switch to WDM mode and do not use your RME device. Instead choose your onboard soundcard. Now load your project and test the same scenario changing screensets and see if the lag persists.
 
2. Make sure that your screensets that you save and switch to do not contain the media browser. To do so undock the browser and close it prior to saving the screensets. Then retest loading the screensets and see if there is a lag.
 
On some systems that have the floppy disk controller enabled or if you have network mapped drives, this takes a long time for the browser to initialize causing the delay..
 

OK, now I'm getting somewhere...
 
Removed the media browser, now screensets are working.  Went into bios, disabled floppy as "boot device a" and media browser / screensets seems to be working.  Strange that this would trip up the media browser as there is NO floppy drive in the system and nothing is shown in the OS for floppy.
 
The media browser's presence now still causes a lag over screensets that have no browser, but the lag is about 2s as opposed to 12.
 
I also enabled onboard audio and switched to WDM mode and now the preferences page, changing program settings, is not causing the program to lag for ten seconds.  No intermittent white screens and timeouts.
 
This is good.. . BUT how do I use my RME UFX / ASIO without the lag bugs?  Not planning on using wdm.
 
 
 
 
 
 

If it looks like the media browser is the hang, then going back to the RME shouldn't be a  problem.
 

There were two problems, now there is one.  Changin audio preferences, even just opening closing the pref page causes hang, whitescreen, not responding.
 
Is there a way to clean up the syste  ASIO works with sonar?  Reinstall did not help.

IIRC, there was a suggestion on one of your previous threads http://forum.cakewalk.com/FindPost/3055012 with a reply http://forum.cakewalk.com/FindPost/3055022. Were the interface and driver ever updated?

The lag on the preferences page closing is caused by the RME drivers that take a very long time to reinitialize.
When you close preferences the audio driver is reinitialized. I've talked to RME about it and they said it has something to do with the time it takes to init their driver stack. Make sure you are running their latest firmware and drivers since they made some changes to improve this. 
Also in prefs if you havent changed anything hit cancel to exit to avoid the driver init.