Thanks for the advice - despite what others had said, my Game Mode was ON by default. (I have the Home version, don't know if that makes a difference.) So now it's off...
Can't figure out how to check on Core Parking - everything I'm finding online seems more developer related.
Interestingly, I turned off all Fx, and the CPU loads were showing close to 0 on each core - but the hard drive on the processes monitor in Sonar kept glitching red and then it still stopped the Audio Engine after several seconds - so it seems to be something in the Windows update and totally external to Sonar.