Although I own X1, I made the decision to continue working with 8.5.3. Sometimes, like everyone else,  I need to do a bit of cutting, snipping and line up work on say a really nice bass track that has a couple timing issues or maybe work on a drum track. Anytime I have more than a few tracks with  audio snap enabled - at some point with, continued moving of transients, (though I cannot ever tell when) Sonar will crash. I can sometimes work on the same project for days without issues but always whenever some threshold is crossed with audio snap, it will crash Sonar - and always at exactly the same spot. When that happens, 8.5 will never play the entire song again without help.
 
What I discovered some time back is  that thankfully, Sonar 6 will play the troubled file - always. So I open the file in 6, freeze the last track that I did audio snap work on or series of tracks if drums  (when the crashing began) and resave it as a new file with the sub title - Whatever.frozen.cwp. I then reopen the file in 8.5 and it will faithfully play. It is a pain to do this because often certain settings are lost and certain teleported vsti's loose setups but at least the file was not lost.
 
Not to exaggerate, I have had probably a hundred or more hard crashes with 8.5 under these circumstances which leaves me with only the desktop and convertors buzzing through the mains. But restarting the convertors will fix that (most times but not always) and then I restart Sonar.
 
They really should not have left 8.5 orphaned with this horrendous bug. I hope this helps someone that may think their file is lost.

I suspect that AudioSnap is trying to allocate more memory than is available. If that's the case, then you're right: it is a bug, because SONAR should recover gracefully from a memory allocation failure even if it means losing some AudioSnap data. 
 
I have seen this behavior. My defense against it is to never have more than 3 AudioSnap-enabled clips at a time, and to bounce them immediately after editing. If I need more than 3, I split the clips into smaller chunks (the clip length determines how much data has to be stored). Since I've adopted that policy, I've not had a single AudioSnap-related crash in 3 or 4 years.

Don't know what causes it Dave. Maybe you're right about memory. But I already do -  only enable audio snap on small snippets. Always have done this. Something like maybe  4 bars on drum tracks. But that consists of usually 6 tracks.
 
I just don't like to render the tracks until just before mix time - unless I must. Another thing that bothers me, I detest the color they have chosen for frozen tracks. Just about un-viewable on my system and I can find no way to change that.   

Hmm. You mentioned bass tracks so I pictured entire tracks being A/S-enabled. 4 bars' worth of drum tracks really shouldn't be a problem. Unless of course you have a bunch of virtual instruments eating up RAM, but I know you're not creating 200-track cinema scores.
 
I'm thinking the only way you'll ever solve the mystery is by sending a crash dump to CW. They'll be able to tell you what's been causing the crashes. Have you ever done that?
 
btw, I agree with the color annoyance on frozen tracks. Ugh. Some of my big projects are solid sky-blue from top to bottom! So much for organizing tracks by colors.

No I have never sent them a crash dump. I just learned where they are stored. Hope they are in chronological order or something like that. There will be a boatload of them. The DAW machine is a ADK that I had built when the Core i7 hit the market. The machine has everything and anything to do with the internet disabled. And because of XP pro I believe that it will only see about 3g of memory. Yes I do some pretty large projects but usually the string and horn libraries are running on networked machines. Absolutely perfect results there.
 
I also use RealGuitar in many projects. I have never had any issues at all with that except when I try to freeze a track. It never ever plays a frozen track with the wonderful variations and sensitivity that is received from a unfrozen track. We talked about that a few years back and pretty much reached the conclusion that because it is unknown how many samples and variations are really being played, and all the built in idiosyncracies and tricks they are using to give that exceptionally real sound - it is best not to  freeze that VST unless absolutely necessary.
 

Your cure is probably because Sonar 6 doesn't know what audiosnap is so it doesn't load it. You then save and re-open in 8.5.3 it's all gone.
I've found that once you do anything with AS, it can't be removed and all kinds of gremlins remain.
The whole AS thing is useless garbage as far as I'm concerned.
(don't know if it's any better in the X's). I have X1 and X2 but have never used them.

Sonar 6 has audio snap. I never found any bugs in that version of audio snap.

I stand corrected. (and amazed).