My usually rock solid setup has been suffering from crashes for the last few months. When I finally had a few minutes to look into it, I came here to the forums (of course).
I was able to identiify a particular plugin that was causing the "white out" freeze. But even after those were all replaced i was still experiencing this freeze where, even after I ended the program, Sonar.exe was still running as a process. I could not end the process or the process tree. After a few minutes, it ended on it's own. It was excruciating waiting for it to end while clients stood by. I could not start sonar until the process ended and cycling the interface did not help.
ACCORDING TO A POST I FOUND HERE ON THE FORUM, this can be caused by midi interfaces. I checked my computer and sure enough, my old m-audio midi sport uno thingy was hanging out of the back of the machine not connected to any midi devices. Someone needed it one day and then it was just left there dangling from a usb port amongst the dozens of cables and wires.
i wound it up and put it away and i am back to rock solid! I would NEVER have thought it was possible.