If the machine is rebooting, check to make sure the processor is seated correctly against the cooling fan. Overheating from a cooler that isn't seated well on the processor will cause rebooting.

I appreciate your taking the time to respond to this thread.
 
But . . .
 

JonD
I would start by making sure the Fast Track Ultra is showing correctly under driver settings.  IOW, don't assume nothing has changed from your last setup.

From my second post to this thread: "It did not crash because of the interface or the OS. . . "
 

 After the upgrade, my interface changed to a generic ASIO driver, with the proper ones visible below but grayed out.  Once I switched to WASAPI (instead of ASIO), the normal drivers were accessible again, and I just manually unticked "generic" and ticked the correct ASIO drivers.  After hitting apply, this affected a bunch of other settings as well.

That has nothing to do with the problem that I experienced.
 

If your interface driver looks okay, then I'd move on to the plugins.  Try one or more of these:
 
- Under Edit-pref, uncheck "Replace VST2 Plug-ins When Opening Projects".  Apply.  Go back in and rescan plugins.  What happens?
- Under same place, uncheck "Rescan failed plugins"  Apply.  Go back and rescan.. What happens?
- If scans okay after doing the above, check the excluded plugins list.  Is Ozone there?

From my first post in this thread:
 
"After installation (an upgrade from X2), none of my VST3s showed up, nor did some VST2s.  I tried the "Reset and rescreen" trick recommended by Cakewalk, but that didn't work either.  Worse, Sonar crashed a couple of times in the process, usually when I tried to use the plug-in manager for scanning."
 

- Use shift key to open Sonar in safe mode (bypasses plugins).  What happens?

As the problem I'm having is that X3 is not loading VSTs, what in the world would this accomplish?
 

Point being, if it is a plugin causing a problem, you can isolate it, then once you are sure everything else scans okay, you troubleshoot the plugin (Make sure you have the latest version, or you may need to reinstall it, etc).

Point being, it is not a plugin causing the problem, as my later experiment with my laptop (also documented in this thread) established.
 
I've found a kluge to work around X3's failure to recognize specific VST3s.  However, I'm particularly concerned with the non-BSD, complete and total crash of the computer when trying to save the X3 plugin from Plug-in Manager with Sonar X3 open.  I also noticed some truly bizarre behavior of X3 that I haven't mentioned yet.  Specifically, at one of my re-scan attempts, it get caught in some kind of loop and kept rescanning the same VSTs, over and over again, and never finished.  The only way to deal with it was to kill the vstscan process.
 
My guess is that the Ubercrash was the result of the vstscan process running while I was trying to save the X3 preset.  My bet is that, rather than use standard OS calls for disk reads or writes, the software tries to go direct to the drive driver (or, maybe, a BIOS call); given the new "background scan" feature in X3, I'd say this is very likely.  I have a 512 GB SSD for a program drive and 4-disk RAID5 array for music data.  Though there is nothing particularly arcane about this hardware, I doubt either or, particularly, the combination are found in the typical Sonar user's computer.  The fact that I could save the preset on my laptop without crashing strongly suggests that I'm right about this, i.e. the problem is Sonar's write-disk coding, which doesn't play well some disk device drivers.

Middleman
If the machine is rebooting, check to make sure the processor is seated correctly against the cooling fan. Overheating from a cooler that isn't seated well on the processor will cause rebooting.

Any mis-seated hardware can cause seemingly random hard reboots.  However, my machine isn't "rebooting."  It rebooted only once when I tried to do a very specific task that is often invoked by sophisticated software by calling on a device driver (or possibly a BIOS routine), rather than an OS call.

[Edit: If you solved it, never mind...]

Something weird obviously happened during your initial scan of plugins.  Anti-virus conflict maybe?
 
In any case, you seem okay with your "kludge" workaround, so congratulations!
 
Hardly the "VST Disaster" you proclaimed in your thread title.  Obviously up to you, but you might consider changing the thread name, so people perusing the forum don't get the wrong idea.
 
 

You need to look up the word disaster in that dictionary.

This is a communications crisis. Good luck with your disaster.

PTravel,
 
Sheesh, if it's truly a disaster, then it was of your own making. 
 
You've been involved in IT for decades, but apparently don't know that it's unwise to install a major software upgrade to a production PC just a day or two after the upgrade's release!
 
I'm not convinced this is a bug; your description of the issue strongly suggests some sort of weird glitch during scanning.  Either way, see above statement.
 
I can only imagine the novel-length emails you must send Microsoft the days following new OS releases.  Oh wait, you don't upgrade your OS the day a new one is released?  Why not?  (Maybe see above statement?).
 
And since you won't accept congratulations for finding an awful, inelegant "kludge" to your problem, might we word it differently for your sensitivities?  Instead of kludge.... how about "Pirouette"?
 
Congratulations on your Pirouette!  A job well-done - even if you did make a huge kludge of it letting us know you did all the work. 

JonD
PTravel,
 
Sheesh, if it's truly a disaster, then it was of your own making. 
 
You've been involved in IT for decades, but apparently don't know that it's unwise to install a major software upgrade to a production PC just a day or two after the upgrade's release!

I don't work in IT and music composition and recording is just a hobby I do after work.  As I mentioned, I've been using Cakewalk/Sonar since before it was a DAW.  I've never had a single serious issue with the software.  And, yes -- when a well-respected (and deserving of that respect) company like Cakewalk issues a new release, I expect it to work as advertised, not counting minor tweaks that get tweaked in a later update.  I use a lot of software of equal or greater complexity (in terms of programming) to Sonar.  I've never had a situation in which a program from a major publishing house crashed my computer in this fashion -- at least not by just using it as intended.
 

I'm not convinced this is a bug; your description of the issue strongly suggests some sort of weird glitch during scanning.  Either way, see above statement.

I never said it was a bug.  What I said was this: no one can code a program that runs perfectly on every computer in every conceivable hardware and software combination.  I also recognize that when coding for intensive I/O, it's usually necessary to by-pass the OS calls and go direct to the driver.  There's nothing wrong with that, but it risks incompatibilities in specific contexts.  What I find particularly frustrating is when a company's tech person presents a generalization as an absolute that I know to be false and resorts to the old, "it must be your driver/hardware" buck passing.
 

I can only imagine the novel-length emails you must send Microsoft the days following new OS releases.  Oh wait, you don't upgrade your OS the day a new one is released?  Why not?  (Maybe see above statement?).

You're right, I don't upgrade my OS the day a new one is released, and that's because I don't consider Microsoft a company that puts out extremely high-quality software.
 

And since you won't accept congratulations for finding an awful, inelegant "kludge" to your problem, might we word it differently for your sensitivities?  Instead of kludge.... how about "Pirouette"?

I like pirouette.  You were the one who put kludge in quotes in your original post, and kludge is exactly the right word. Unexplained computer crash aside, on two separate computers X3 found the Ozone and Celemony VST3s, but did not put them into the Effects Plug-in Browser, and the only way to get them in was to manually load them using the Plug-in Manager and then over-write the X3 Producer Effects preset.  THAT is the very definition of a kluge.
 

Congratulations on your Pirouette!  A job well-done - even if you did make a huge kludge of it letting us know you did all the work.

Uh . . . what?
 

you can also turn off the auto-reboot & get chance to see the bsod msg...

PTravel

Silicon Audio
Folks, keep in mind that virtually all AV scanners have a kernel component also - used for real-time file scanning.  It is effectively a kernel-based driver.  If there is a BSOD or reboot happening during the VST scan, it will be worth temporarily disabling or removing your AV to see if the problem goes away.  The other alternative would be setting up an exclusion in your AV settings for the location of your VST files.

That's an interesting possibility, given that Sonar uses some kind of background process for scanning for VSTs.  However, I will not use any software that requires disabling AV.  Ever.
 

Noel can correct me if I'm wrong, but I doubt Sonar does anything directly at the kernel level, so can't reboot your PC.  However, it may be exercising something that does.

That's possible.  However, given that the VST scan is a separate process, I'm not convinced that Sonar does not by-pass OS calls for disk I/O.
 

Question:  Does your CPU usage go up very high during the VST scan?

My CPU usage never goes very high, except when rendering video. :)
 

by sounds of it... you have every answer except the one your looking for.
just step back for a second and listen to some of the posts here.
your simply writing them off because you think that's not the issue or that you know better.
the answers to your problem are written here very clear, just step back and take a breath.
you even have the guy that wrote the code for x3 trying to help you but your arguing with him that he's wrong ?
I don't think so.
 
Sonar x3 is a brand new program and hasn't had time to be run in some data bases yet for Reputation scans, I would reconsider your choice to not temp shut your AV off at least until you've problem solved your issue.
you've said you do this as a hobby ? well the professionals all shut their AV off or don't have it installed at all.
 
im a computer builder myself and have asst. many users here with builds.
the VST scan will not cause a reboot. I think you know what will so im not going to keep stressing that.
I hate seeing titles like the one of this thread because its anything but a disaster, im very pleased with the way x3 is scanning VST's
and its new implementation.

+100   IMO, this thread title should be changed.

same here, change the title, you wont follow any advise given to you by the person who wrote the code for this program and all you want to believe is your own solutions.

I seem to have my VST issues ironed out. I have no clue what happened regarding the Waves plug-ins and licensing. It just started working after a few more tries.
 
I like the default organization. It's probably a little more in depth than I need, but it saved me a lot of time organizing my plug-ins.
 
Could be the Right-Click access to Manage Plugin Layouts is a potential bug, but I have the same issue in X2. I have to use the top menyu to access instead of right-click.
 
The plug-in manager took a little longer to open than X2a's, but worked fine after that.

brconflict
Could be the Right-Click access to Manage Plugin Layouts is a potential bug, but I have the same issue in X2. I have to use the top menyu to access instead of right-click.
The plug-in manager took a little longer to open than X2a's, but worked fine after that.

Are you guys referring to plugin manager? If so don't call it the browser since its very confusing to know where you are looking at plugins. Do you have the 32 and 64 bit versions of X3 installed? I found a bug a couple of days ago (in all versions, not just X3) where if you run the 32 bit version of SONAR and launch plugin manager from there, after that the 64 bit version of SONAR will call up the wrong version of plugin manager. As a result it looks like plugins are missing since its referring to the 32 bit version.
I wonder if the confusion is related to this. Its unnecessary to open plugin manager unless you want to create a new layout.