Weird half speed (EDIT)

I've got an XP system, pentium 2.4 gig, with Layla soundcard...and 2.2XL. For my needs, all acoustic mic'd music...2.2 is perfectly fine and has produced several successful and well reviewed CDs. I am 2/3 finished with a new CD and all of a sudden I turn on the computer, hit playback on a project, and the now time moves at best at half speed and the resulting sound is also at best an octave lower. It is a dedicated recording computer, never hooked to the internet, so no virus software to screw with things, and I have not added any new software since I started the project. It has 2 7200 rpm hard drives. I figure it's got to be the computer...I've rebooted several times, full shut down, re profiled the sound card..closed the program opened the program..etc etc. What could be causing this and what can I do about it ? Any help very much appreciated. Gary Gallier

I'll check that...but, after posting I left the computer on for about an hour, came back and opened the program and then the project, hit playback, and every thing was normal. This was done several times when I first encountered the problem, including full reboot, with no change. Now acts normal. I can't imagine a hard drive would act like a turntable if it wasn't spinning full speed, but that is what it was like. Now I'm really confused. And still would like to find out why this happened so I can fix/prevent it. Thanks so much for your answer. Gary

Clear out your picture cache.

Sounds very frustrating.
 
It is possible that there is a process running, that you do not know about, that is changing the sample rate for your audio card. There have been numerous posts in the Sonar producer forums about this in the past, so a search there might be in order. I seem to recall that windows media player and several other applications were found to cause this problem in the past. Since some of these media players load themselves on startup, they can be insidious. I also seem to recall that tweaking the Sonar setting for sharing the driver with other programs or somesuch was helpful in some cases.
 
Clearing the picture cache has solved a lot of problems as well. In most cases the reason it works is a mystery. The picture cache nominally just includes copies of the waveform display of a project so that when you re-play the same bit, the program can just use the saved copy of the visual waveform instead of creating a new one every time. Deleting those copies should not damage your project.