When auditioning certain .wav files, the mouse cursor flickers between its normal state and the hourglass icon. As this is going on, the transport displays "building transient list." Clicking on some .rx2 shows the same mouse behaviour while the REX file is being extracted and the audio data is loaded. It's not a big deal but it takes away a few more micro seconds from the pleasure I get using X3. Any simple solutions?

REX files need to be imported internally before we can preview them since its not a native file format. The display is showing the normal process that happens when you import a rex file...

Thanks very much for your response, Noel. I checked the same files on another machine (which is not as powerful as the one quoted in my signature) and the whole process is much faster - so much so that the delay is hardly noticeable. This leads me to suspect something may be going on with the video card, which was first suggested by a Cakewalk tech support person a while ago. It's a home-built job (my first) so maybe I've done something weird or have not done something normal and obvious. Sonar X3 also takes a long time to open on that machine, even though I've got an SSD drive. Sonar X2 did the same thing, which was when I first contacted the support team. Perhaps my efforts since then towards fixing the issue have not borne fruit. I might try posing these questions to the good folk in the Computers section of the forum, but if there are any further suggestions here I'm happy to take them onboard.

I doubt its the video card. Are the loops on the SSD drive or on another disk? A slow or fragmented disk could also make it sluggish like that.

Cheers, Noel. The loops are on another disk. I defragged it and there is definite improvement with the loading of the wav files. So that's solved.
 
Now I've got to try to resolve the slow loading of X3 issue...perhaps that's a subject for another thread.

X3 actually loads faster than X2 and earlier. Some things to troubleshoot for slow loading of the app.
 
- The audio or MIDI interface could be taking long to initialize. Set audio driver to the default windows driver to test
- A control surface could be taking long to initialize - disable all control surfaces to test
- Disable antivirus software - that can slow down loading because of excessive checks
- defrag the system drive, check for disk read errors on the drive as well
-  Try disabling VST scan on startup. This shouldn't make a difference but you can try it.
- check if its slow loading the app or a specific project
- If you have a different normal template with lots of plugins that could take time to load 

Fantastic, Noel. The antivirus software caused the issue. Loads up really fast now. I am a very happy camper/customer

It is generally a bad idea to run antivirus software on a DAW. Many AV programs are really intrusive and do background checks all the time.
The only AV I use is Microsoft Security Essentials and it seems to not affect performance for me. I think MS is a bit more careful about using as few resources as possible compared to the other players.

Interesting. I was using Microsoft Security Essentials - turning that off made the difference. On another machine I use, I also use MS Essentials and have not experienced problems so far.