Whats wrong with my system?

Dear Group,

I've been averaging a crash every 20-30 minutes for the past few weeks, and I'm not sure what to do. I have had some successes finding the culprit - Kontakt 4.2.2 has some known issues with specific instruments, so I've learned just not to use them. Every time my system crashes, I need to reboot my computer, and as you can imagine it's an unbelievable time waster. I want to share the symptoms in a final effort to make X1 work in a stable manner before I jump ship. I've always accepted the fact that if I push my computer a little bit, I'll crash every now and then, but it's happening way too often. There must be something seriously wrong for this to be happening.

Most common problems:

1) Sonar hangs and crashes after a bounce. Almost every VST Instrument I have will cause this (Kontakt 4.2.2, Omnisphere, Melodyne, RMX, Vienna Ensemble). Even real-time bounces will do this, though more commonly it's a fast bounce issue)

2) Pretty often I'll crash after performing some sort of operation - to MIDI and audio alike. Quantizing, nudging a clip around, etc. Instead of the expected result, nothing will happen, my "thinking" cursor (a spinning circle) stays and I lose control of the program. Inevitably crashing the program and causing a restart.

3) Exporting Audio. Similar to bouncing, I usually have about a 50/50 chance of success. Either it works, or it immediately freezes and crashes. Seems to happen pretty consistently with all the VSTs that I use.

4) Losing sound. This has been plaguing me for over a year (was happening in 8.5 as well). After loading a certain amount of instruments, I'll just lose audio. Usually happens when I take the focus away from Sonar and then come back. The audio meters read sound, as if everything is working, but I get no sound. Sometimes I can get audio back by randomly clicking around my OS, and returning to Sonar. Another method I've used to get sound back is to open preferences and unclick "Multi-Processor Support", though sometimes all I need to do is go to preferences and then close it.

My system specs-

HARDWARE
i7 8-Core machine with 24 GB of RAM... (RAM tested and functional)
Separate OS Drive, Audio Drive, and 2 Sample Drives, all 7200 RPM Standard
NVidia GeForce 9500 GT with the latest drivers
Roland OctaCapture 10X10  Audio Interface
M-Audio Keystation Pro USB

SOFTWARE
Sonar X1 build 255
Windows 7
Kontakt 4.2.2
Omnisphere Latest Update
Stylus RMX Latest Update
Trillian Latest Update
Vienna Ensmble
Melodyne

A couple extra remarks.
1) I run much more stably when using less virtual instruments. I can have 100+ audio tracks and crash VERY rarely. I'm almost sure that the problem occurs when using these VST Instruments.
2) I don't use 32-bit plugins anymore if I can help it - system stability declines further when bitbridge become involved. Melodyne seems to be incredibly unstable, especially when running in conjunction with Spectrasonics instruments.
3) Kontakt stability has been pretty unsatisfying as well. I really wonder if there might be a single setting in system preferences that would improve my painfully unstable situation - any ideas?

I have a feeling that with all of these problems, there must be more than one culprit, and at this point I'm ready to start trying a different DAW to see if it just meshes better with my prticular system. As a sidenote, in trying to stay optimistic about these problems- I have been forced to become a much calmer and patient person as a result of all of this. When I crash (which is quite often these days), I see it as an opportunity to grab a cup of coffee, walk out of the studio to kiss my wife, or jump on the Sonar forum to see what's going on. So, thanks Sonar (or whatever is causing the issues) for giving me more free time!

Any ideas or feedback is much appreciated! What can I do, what are your suggestions?

yea, I'm definitely going to run some tests - will report back shortly if I find anything interesting. Had a new type of crash just now that I thought was really fun - everything suddenly disappears, Sonar no longer is open! Just abruptly throws me to the desktop without any warning. Fun.

-Alex

If I have a bad MB, I'm switching professions. Maybe I'll take up bird counting. Any other suggestions?

If I have a bad MB, I'm switching professions. Maybe I'll take up bird counting. Any other suggestions?

 
First, don't stress out about it...  
The beauty of a PC is that it's modular.
Find the culprit.
If it's hardware... replace it.
If it's software... reload/reconfigure it.
 
If the motherboard is defective (and the machine is recent make), it's easy to find a replacement.
If you get the same exact unit... the swapout would take about 15 minutes.  
It's a small PITA... but in the grand scope of things it's a small bump in the road.

As a matter of interest... how many background processes are running on your PC?

How much of your 24gigs of RAM is actually free when you load Sonar?

'Pushing' hardware hard isn't necessarily directly related to crashes - more often than not - software incompatibilities or poor error handling written into code causes crashes.  If you never have an issue when running your other software, then chances are your hardware and OS are likely ok - you may want to consider it looking at your virtual instrument and plugins, as a core OS and Sonar build is relatively stable. 

Your getting some great advice here. Another option well worth mentioning is to double check what is going on in your msconfig startup items if you haven't already. 

Learn what each and every one of those startup items do and make damn sure they are absolutely necessary to your DAW (most aren't)-- otherwise disable them. I've seen this practice solve quite a few "unexplainable" crashes and odd behavior.