To talk about the crashes and the Fault Reporter for a moment, since I think it's useful information...
The focus of the Fault Reporter was to collect crash info so that we can resolve stability issues and have people not have to focus on that. This got rolled out in SONAR X1 Producer Expanded and after collecting a lot of data we've squashed tons of stability bugs. More often then not nobody in support can resolve a fundamental crash, which can lead to dead ends between support staff and customers. We can always make suggestions on how to improve the stability of the system overall, but if there is a particular area of SONAR that is prone to crashes we might not know the root cause of it or if we do might not be able to return any info until an update is released.
The fault reporter collects .dmp files from your crash, parses and analyzes it against the debugging symbols for the build of SONAR being used, and logs internal reports for developers to investigate. It's a very smart system. When I send a crash report to Microsoft or Apple from the OS I always wonder what happens with the report after the fact. I wonder if they have a similar system or if it ends up in limbo somewhere. When you send one to Cakewalk, I know exactly what happens. It becomes useful information for us and our developers are very active at using that information to make the program better.
We've already resolved hundreds of stability issues between SONAR X1 Producer Expanded and SONAR X3 Producer as a result of the data we were able to collect. Some of these fixes were small, some major. It took time to collect data though. The initiative at spending time creating the system has paid off already and as things progress the situation is only improving. Ironically this initiative was started by someone in support who programmed the majority of the whole system. This is why we're always telling people to use the systems we have in place. It's not to push people along, it's because we know for a fact that asking someone to send a Fault Report through if they have crashes is the most useful and time-effective way we can help customers. Customer satisfaction-wise as well as in the reports we've collected, SONAR X3 has been a very stable product.
Anyhow, it doesn't hurt if you're experiencing a ton of crashes to get on the phone with someone in support. They may be able to extract some useful info as to the cause of the crash (such as if it's a plug-in, or a particular behavior) that you can avoid. There's no way we can give a blanket statement as far as "avoid x, y, z in the program" however since the set of variables between systems is essentially infinite.
I think ultimately if you're experiencing a lot of crashes, send some Fault Reports through if you're connected to the internet. If not, get on the phone with support and we'll take a stab at parsing the info manually so we can try to identify what is at fault and point you in the right direction, or if necessary, log reports internally the old fashioned way.