hello! I have a major problem: SONAR sometimes "brokes down" - the screen update goes very jerky (cursor, meters etc) and stuttering (1-2 frames per second) though sound continues to play normally after all. When this happens all the interface controls become very unresponsive, nearly unusable until i press stop. Resetting Audio Engine, RESTARTING program doesn't do anything! The only remedy is to reboot Windows entirely.

My setup:
AMD Athlon II 250 (2 core, 3000 MHz), 785G embedded video Catalyst 10.10
4 GB RAM
ESI Maya 44 (which i use in SONAR, ASIO Mode), XP32 driver 1.11
ASUS Xonar Essense ST (which mainly for listening, but sometimes i use it in SONAR too)
Win XP SP3 32bit

please give some kind of clue! This happens irregularly, but at least once a day. Sometimes it may be after several hours of working and sometimes after several minutes - i can't figure out the reasons. (( When it happens - I just save at current point and heading for another reboot...

I tried to reinstall XP on a clear disk C: - the problem stayed. I switched from SONAR 8 to 8.5 - same thing. All other programs (Starcraft II for example) behave good and stable. Maybe its is some soft of SONAR incompatibility with my hardware but how to know for sure?

i love SONAR but this really pisses me of   please help

It's most likely a video card problem, and I do not know anyhing about them, unfortunately.
If that embedded video Catalyst is your video card, and is integrated to your motherboard, it can be you don't have many choices.

Many video acceleration systems and similar things aimed for powerfull video handling when gaming have caused problems to music makers for a long time. What I've understood about the guru-talk they cause big temporary peaks in CPU/memory consumption and also interfere with other actions more than desired. Many video cards today even have a HDMI soundcard to make life harder for DAW-people.

Let's hope a more knowledgeable person chimes in.

From your description it's probably not this but .... Have you pressed the PAUSE key inadvertently? If so, Sonar only updates the display every second in pause mode (to save CPU cycles)

No, no... this not the case. )) I don't use that button at all

pardon me, but that WAS the case! )) omg... I am sorry it was really because of Pause/Break key! I didn't use this button at all in SONAR but used it in Punto Switcher, which intercepts key pressings and somehow influenced SONAR behavior but very strange - only in one way - thats why i couldn't turn off that mode after accidently triggering it. After changing PS option from Break to Pause a freely switching that mode in SONAR.

Thank you!

Glad you got it sorted

Haha, I had the exact same problem for YEARS. It happened a few times every week, and the only way I could get it back to normal was to restart the computer..
 But yeah, one day I noticed that I had accidentally touched the Pause button all these times, and it was the best day of my life.

Soooo glad I found this thread! The same thing has plagued me on and off for years as well.... What a relief.

Thanks!

mkb

Can't wait to try this tonight.  I've been experiencing a similar problem and am thinking my cat have pressed the Pause button while taking a stroll on my keyboard!

Wow... this is awesome. I was able to recreate the behavior that I was having a problem with. Thanks, all! :)