PLEASE HELP Experiencing bad pops crackles & dropouts after Win10 Update, very frustrated

So after months of totally solid performance, my copy of Sonar Artist started experiencing pops and dropouts even during playback of single-track sessions that are only 44.1\16bit. It will play normally for maybe a minute and then start skipping\popping and eventually it just stops entirely and I get that little blue box in the lower right that says "The audio engine has stopped responding." This started happening directly after Win10 decided it had to update something, it rebooted and did that blue "Updating Windows; Please Don't Turn Off Your Computer" screen with the spinning circle of white dots. Took about 10 minutes, and when windows finally started and I tried to work on a session the issues began. What could have changed in windows that would cause this?
 
My interface is a Presonus Audiobox 1818VSL. My system specs are: Sonar Artist (latest version), AMD A8-7410 APU 2.2Ghz, 8GB Ram.
 
Everything is up to date OTHER than the control software\monitor mixer for the Audiobox, because the latest versions don't allow you to do direct hardware monitoring of the inputs which is essential for me when tracking bass. But again, even with this old version everything was working like a charm until that automatic windows update.
 
ASIO Buffer is set as high as possible as well. CPU and Ram Usage in task manager are both quite low, less than 7% each. It's just so frustrating, after months of flawless performance windows forces me to do some mysterious ambiguous "update" and breaks everything....