As mentioned before, I don't have problems with V-Vocal and I always wondered why it caused such angst. I was using it on a vocal last night and it kept crashing Sonar, so now I see what people are talking about.
 
I'm not sure if this is the issue, but I always use V-Vocal as the last editing process on a vocal, so any takes have been consolidated into a single track. Last night, I tried to apply it to a clip in a take lane. As soon as I bounced all the takes together into a single track and deleted the unused take lanes, then V-Vocal went back to working just fine.
 
Another tip is that if you're working on a small clip, apply trimming.

After reading about all the issues with V-Vocal on these forums as per the links below, I pretty much do what you stated & it seems to work for me too!
 
http://forum.cakewalk.com/m1686823.aspx
http://forum.cakewalk.com/tm.aspx?m=2082818
 
Not that I do a great deal with vocals as I mainly use it to alter vocal-chops for effect type vocals but I've found that doing what you've stated, pretty much means your project remains stable.
 
As a general habit, once I'm happy I normally commit/bounce all my changes & delete the other takes so that my project is as clean as possible & doesn't grow too large as I tend to delete all the left over audio files which aren't required any more.

That's certainly worth doing, Craig.

I don't often use V-Vocal, but I would be likely to have multiple takes of a vocal I cared enough to use it on. I'll keep your suggestion in mind.
 

Does this happen with Melodyne I wonder?