@rbecker - YOUR issue may also be that BitBridge or JBridge may not have ended in memory, and this could be causing your long delay at being able to restart Sonar.  Again, simply check in Task Manager to see if either application is hanging out in memory.
 
Another thing you could try is to power-cycle your audio interface, which has been reported to also help speed up the freeing up of things that are hanging out in memory.
 
Bob Bone
 

Thanks for all the replies.
 
I have no 32 bit plugins in this project as I've given up on trying to bridge them, but thanks for the suggestion.
 
Last night before I retired for the night, I think I had some insight into what is happening - It looks like one of the drives in my audio RAID array is failing!  I noticed Sonar gave me a disk warning when I was playing an old project which really shouldn't have been the case.  I then backed up my data from the array and the disc transfer speed was 5 MB/s!
 
I am now trying with the HDs disconnected with my fingers crossed I have no more crashes.
 

Ok, so everything was working for half an hour without the RAID drives connected and then, crash!  This time it was when I loaded RX 2 via Sonar, but it froze requiring a reboot.
 
I am at a bit of a loss here, but will keep trying things.  Something is majorly broken for my machine to freeze to the point of requiring a reboot.  I'll see if I can spot something in the Windows Event log.

Ok, just installed the latest BIOS and drivers for my system.
One thing that just came to mind is perhaps my new GAIA synth with its USB audio driver is interfering?  I could uninstall the driver since I'm only using it for USB MIDI, but I'll try that next.
 

OK, same freeze.
 
Looking in the Windows event viewer I can see that there was a problem with some USB device, which I am now thinking is the GAIA audio driver.  I have disconnected the GAIA and am trying again.  I may have to use the GAIA with MIDI cables instead of with their driver.
The Softtube FET compressor is crashing again and generating an error report when I start Sonar, so I have once again uninstalled it (it had been working fine for a while after the last reinstall).  I have sent a help request to Softtube.

Every time this crash happens I have to clear my picture cache - any idea why?

Maybe the crash is corrupting the current project wave images. Try moving the cache to a different physical drive.

I think I missed something here - what was the solution?  And, what is the status of the picture cache?
 
Bob Bone

Sorry, I was in the process of updating this post to solved when this thread disappeared and I thought I had somehow deleted it.
 
I solved the problem - it seems it was entirely related to my Roland GAIA synthesizer and it's driver.  You see the driver allows the GAIA to function as an audio interface as well as a USB midi driver (the part I was using).  I wasn't using the audio interface functionality and it was greyed out in the Sonar options, but after reading the readme file that came with the GAIA driver, I realized it had issues with USB in Windows 7.
 
After looking up the issue in the Windows event log (thank you Scook!) I realized the crash was being caused by something USB related.  I disconnected the GAIA, ran MIDI cables instead and PROBLEM SOLVED! No crashes!

FABULOUS news!
 
Now, get back to work!  :)
 
Bob Bone