Good to hear!

.

Yeah, we all have to keep that "clean install of the OS" thingy in the backs of our minds.
 
Especially when it come to very strange issues/problems that happen to our music drives....! 

Catharsis!

CakeAlexS
Yeah that worked for me not so long ago .... :) Good call!

Yep, I agree Alex. I knew I was slacking by installing Win8 over Vista. Another interesting observation; a lot of software bloat was occupying ~50gb more space on my OS drive vs. the clean install. No doubt a lot of that left over Vista/Win8 bloat was choking programs like sonar. Now the daw boots quickly, X3 starts very fast, NO Glitchy Graphics in console mode, low buffer sizes...  :) 
 
Lastly, Win 8.1 gets high marks here.