Welcome back to Cakewalk and the wonderful world of music production.  The increase in computer processing power, decrease in the cost of memory and software has made the present a great time for recording.
 
Perhaps you would enjoy learning more about recording, music production and Music Creator 6.  Coursera.org offers a FREE Introduction to Music Production class.  The class is by the Berklee School of Music.
 
If you're more the reading type you may want to check "Home Recording for Musicians" by Jeff Strong.  It's a Dummies book and in it's fifth edition.  You are able to find earlier editions for a discounted price.
 
Finally, Music Creator's video tutorials were created by Groove3.  Groove3 offers a complete video series for Music Creator for the same price you paid for Music Creator.  I have the videos stored on my hard drive for easy access and quick reference.  It's nice to be able to review a segment whenever I desire.

Jim
 
Thanks for the tips.  Part of the reason I've returned to Cakewalk is because my teenage son told me that he is interested in music production as a career.  I will suggest that he look into these resources, too.
 
Steve

For some reason, during one of the releases or maintenance updates, those buffer values changed, down to 250 from their prior values of 500.
 
For many, this has caused no issues, but every now and then, someone experiences dropouts and such, like what has been happening to you, and the fix always seems to be to put those buffer values back up to 500, or even raise them to 750.
 
Glad you are working now - that change to Sonar's default values for those buffers has always been a head scratcher, for precisely the reasons we see here - in that 250 may just be too small to be a good value for defaults for those buffers.
 
Bob Bone