Hi Rob and Alex,
I really thank both of you for your help! I really appreciate it and am sure others do too! Your both masters at sonar no doubt and do look out for your suggestions and recommendations in other posts you make and know I can trust them too.
It's interesting that I DO have my Windows update settings to automatically update recommended updates and Microsoft updates. I also did run the check now for updates and it had NOT found any, so I manually applied the 2012.4 redist update - beats me!!! (maybe cakewalk should package this in to their updates) anyway I'll need to investigate further why windows update hadn't found any new updates based on my version of the redist software.
Why I don't use the perfectly suited focusrite sound card? I'm glad you asked and if your interested read on... I normally use my notebook as my DAW - HP Envy 17-j005xt, the HP Envy Recline 27" k001a is one the whole family share and I personally haven't used much. Having said that, I don't use the focusrite external soundcard because I use my laptop and having cables and headphones and the device itself dangling seems to get me into trouble with the others here, and causes my laptop to be less mobile - remember I'm a hobbyist at this and make no $$$ using my DAW - if it were to be the case I would have definitely had a purpose built standalone system for this.
My study is where I would connect all the devices for my laptop DAW - though my study is my place of work and even there I don't usually mess around with my DAW. However when I do, this is where I come into problems with interchanging the driver mode settings in the DAW from using the internal sound card to the focusrite - I previously reported that when I change driver modes in sonar this would cause sonar to crash. I was also finding lots of crackles and pops and latency issues when focusrite wasn't used - the asio4all seems to have settled all this behaviour and have stuck to it ever since. I haven't had any issues using it in this way! To be honest haven't bothered to use the focusrite unless I want to lay some guitar tracks down.
So there you have it, I'll one day get around to re-arrange how I use my study and will spend more time in there using my DAW on my laptop instead of work. At the moment when I am in my study I sub-consciously go into work mode and can sometimes lose myself doing work - sadly my work is none related to music or using my DAW, although I do enjoy my work as well....
Thanks for listening and cheers...
Jim