Scook to answer your concerns, my home machine runs SPLAT because I own it and do more in-depth work with music and soft synths through my side business. My work PC runs Professional because it is a broadcast facility specializing in voice overs and post production work with more sound efx and royalty free music already provided to us from various libraries. We felt that SPLAT was overkill for that and since the company pays for the license at work not me, they didn't want to spend the extra $$ since we have multiple editing suites that require SONAR. Plus Cakewalk gave us a good deal and has been very fair with us when it came time for upgrades. Way more so than Adobe.
 
I threw the note chase thought out there as strictly a hypothetical and really didn't think it was related.
 
SH are you running the Focusrite on a USB 2.0 or 3.0 port? I had the problem at home with the Focusrite on both types of ports, but at work the Steinberg was on a 2.0 port only.
 
 
 

I can now reproduce this on a project. It's an older bundle from 2015, if I open it up and drag a wave file in from the browser it will play, no sound will be made, and the transport becomes completely unresponsive so I have to shut things down with Task Manager. If I open the same project and do not use the browser but import the file the normal way, it's fine. Not sure why this is, but maybe it's an issue with the browser.