oh yes I forgot, M-audio does not list the drivers for this interface anymore, this thing is less then 2 years old. I had to search and search for the drivers but I have a feeling that what I downloaded is wrong or out of date. i'm very unhappy about this because I have a hunch this is where the problem is. buying a new interface/soundcard is out of the question, i'm as broke as the 10 commandments.

Did you find the drivers at this page?
 
http://www.avid.com/US/search?q=mobilepre+drivers&spell=1&site=avid_en-us_default%7Cavid_en-us_pressreleases%7Cavid_en-us_default%7Cavid_en-us_pressreleases%7Cmaudio_en-us_default%7Cpinnacle_us_default%7Csibelius_us_default%7Ckbase_en-us_default
 
When you click on the link it currently says that it's down for maintenance until Sunday, but the description does say "Last Updated: June 20, 2013" so I don't think they're out of date. 
 
To be honest I don't think the interface is the problem, the MobilePre's are very decent from what I've heard. You said in your other post that the problem started when you reinstalled Sonar, so this means it was working before then yes? 

thank you sharke, I agree with you about m-audio, I've used them before with no problems, the last was sonar 6, I looked at the link, it still seems to be down. I gotta tell you this is making my life miserable, it's such a distraction. everything worked fine up to a few days ago. do you know of any tricks or methods to help me with this? I mean one could adjust things forever. again, I would appreciate any thoughts you may have.   

I'm not really an expert on audio dropouts and the like, but one thing I would suggest to start off with would be to create a new Windows user account specifically for audio work, that's if you also use you computer for other stuff like I do. Reduce the number of startup programs in this account. It's amazing the crap that loads with Windows on a multipurpose machine. I had all sorts of stuff running in the background related to Outlook, Quickbooks etc. So I created a new "bare bones" user account and everything's been smooth sailing (relatively speaking) since then. I've also heard other people say it helped too. You can also take the opportunity to remove all of the Windows eye candy in that user account if you want. 
 
Also, have you ever been through one of those DAW optimization guides and followed all the steps? It's worth making sure you've done everything possible before digging deeper into the problem. Steinberg have a good guide:
 
https://www.steinberg.net/en/support/knowledgebase_new/show_details/kb_show/optimizing-windows-for-daws.html