Massive instability caused by Rapture version confusion mishmash
Warning: Longish post! This all happened a couple of weeks ago now. I wasn't sure whether to post it but I think it's worth doing so as a cautionary tale...
I was bringing a Producer 8.5 piece into Sonar X2. It was called "rapture_full" because it uses little other than Rapture; I started it when I first bought Rapture (so about 4,000 years ago).
X2 was unable to find Rapture, which meant that I needed to replace all the 'missing' Rapture instances with the newer 64-bit v1.22 version. Then I had to work out what patch each of these needed which took quite a bit of time. Note to self: use patch names for either the MIDI or audio track in future!
So I'd pretty much re-created my piece, fast-forward to the next day and all of the Rapture sounds had changed. I figured out that somehow every instance's cutoff and resonance was reacting to the Mod-Wheel CC's value (even though I was only experimenting on one instance the night before), but one patch sound was still strangely different, which was the 'Sine Bells' patch under the 'Bells' category. Note that this patch doesn't use cutoff or resonance. I tried a new, empty project and just loaded one instance of Rapture into it with that patch, but the sound was still different. I just couldn't work out why. So I uninstalled Rapture and went to my account page to get the installer. Only the v1.0 version is available as a separate installer so I installed that.
However, after doing that the Sine Bells patch sound was still different, so I gave up trying to use Rapture for that and swapped in an instance off Alchemy which had a sound much closer to what I remembered the patch sounded like.
Then all hell broke loose. Sonar was constantly crashing, locking up after playing the track for a minute or two. It had been rock solid the night before so I just didn't know what was happening. I then noticed a couple of other things: I couldn't access any Microsoft websites and Security Essentials had mysteriously vanished from the SysTray! Alarm bells started ringing, so I embarked on a mission to disinfect my PC as it seemed very likely that I'd picked up some viruses somehow, and I thought this was what was behind Sonar crashing. Note to self 2: don't embark upon a full-on disinfection exercise North of 12 Midnight :-D I definitely recommend the information on this page by the way:
http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/248626-45-simple-free-guide-removing-malware So, some time after 4 am I'd finally cleansed, purified and sanctified my PC (it had been q. badly infected by the way) and got some sleep. On to the next day, I reinstalled Security Essentials, re-scanned my system (now clean), uninstalled X2 and then reinstalled it and finally applied the X2a update.
Sonar was still crashing and locking up all over the place! Gah!?
I next tried different versions of the GeForce driver for my video card and uninstalled a bunch of recently installed applications but X2 was still crashing and locking up.
I then noticed that by this point, Rapture wasn't accepting the RegKey from either the v1.0 or v1.22 version and the serial number edit box in the registration dialog was empty and would not accept input. I figured that things had gone very awry in Rapture-land by this point, so I uninstalled v1.22 and searched through my installed programs list (in the Windows' control panel) and found that v1.21 was also still apparently installed. So I uninstalled that too, re-installed v1.0 (32-bit this time), re-registered it and since then Sonar X2 has been rock-solid again...although Sine Bells *still* doesn't sound right, but I've decided I can live with that anomaly and have since edited the patch quite a lot to bring it back to 'normal'.
I'm not sure what the moral of this story is. I'm an idiot, granted, but also that serious Sonar instability can come from unexpected sources or apparently minor/benign changes. Also, uninstalling Sonar does not by a long way uninstall everything; the shared plugins folder, the synths that come with Sonar and a bunch more stuff besides is not uninstalled along with the main application. A fair bit of work is involved if you really want to tear everything down in order to do a clean reinstall.
On the positive side, I did clean my system of infections. I'm still trying to work out how the hell they got on board and nobbled M$'s Security Essentials...and how much I (or anybody) should trust that to provide protection for my system. I've had to do quite a bit of post-disinfection repair too; the rootkit virus had removed the Windows firewall and made it very hard to start after fixing the missing registry entries. To that end, I recommend the 'Windows Repair (All In One)' tool from tweaking.com, great utility.
Anybody know how to extract just the Rapture installer from the X2 files btw? Or perhaps I should just stick with v1.0 32 bit & bitbridge! :^)