Sorry to harp on this, but could you confirm that you have updated to X2a ?

I don't see any mention from you on this. I believe X2 originally had some problems which may have been similar to what you're experiencing.
It would be good to at least get that possibility out of the way.

If you are out of other options, have you considered the FW chipset? Many folks seem to have issues with certain FW devices without a FW card with a Texas instruments chip on it.  If you're not using it, you can disable network 1394 connection in your network connections in the control panel. I would also suggest getting a registry cleaner and clean out the registry.

Paul, I have x2a, I double checked. The good news is, I worked on it straight for about 8 hours tonight, only one crash, and the crash was my fault. still some weird things like take lanes are not resetting after one is deleted. Anyway, I did do windows update, had to go shut off the new services which were installed or turned on by the update  Maybe the win update helped.  Didn't do the firmware, just don't feel good about it yet.

Ohgrant, I put the FW card in and made sure I got a TI chipset.

Well that's good news. I've read lots of funny tales here regarding take lanes so your problems may not be unique.

Just out of curiosity, how do you go about crashing X2 and figure it's your fault ?

I was rendering/mixing/exporting, and I plugged in a usb drive into my computer while it was in the middle of an export. One second after I plugged it in, I just knew I shouldn't have. the computer seemed to lock and then...yep, there it was.... the blue screen of death!  LOL.  I rebooted and let it render/export without plugging anything in and it worked fine for the next few hours.  Note to self, when exporting, just be patient!

My faith in modern tech is dwindling rapidly :-)

Someone is writing software imagining that it will be running alone on the computer. Inserting a usb drive shouldn't crash a system, no matter what it's doing. There may be a fight for internal resources, but there are mechanisms to resolve it.

I'm getting the impression that flaky software is leading people to believe they have flaky hardware. Maybe because hardware is the only thing us customers have direct access to.

Just out of curiostiy, are you using X2 64bit? If so, try using only 64bit plugs. Ampeg SVX can be run under the Amplitube 3 interface and it will be 64bit. Without going back up the page to look, it looks like you had other 32bit plugs as well.

The reason I mention this is that bitbridge and/or JBridge are not the greatest for using 32bit plugs in a 64bit enviroment. I had issues as well untill I stopped using 32bit plugs.

I had an AMD machine which always ran like a dream up to and including X1.
However X2 was more than an absolute disaster.
I had to re-install windows in the end and so ran X1 on it and again it was fine.
Installing X2 once gain killed it.

So I loaded X2 on my other AMD pc. Same story just would not work, although X1 did.
I realise that many of you saying that X2 is fine, but lets get real.
Lots of us have had issues since trying X2.

I am of the opinion that as noted above by some that it all depends on your individual pc.

So I built a new pc with Intel i7 cpu etc etc.
Now running X2 without problems.

Im not wanting to start the fire, but maybe this is the reason.
Some machines will run like a dream and others will make you wish you simply collected postage stamps instead of being a musician.


So the idea of having a recommended spec for Sonar makes sense.
 

There does seem to be a common thread regarding AMD cpus. If Sonar is getting and using direct access to stuff way down in an Intel based system I can easily imagine that causing problems with an AMD cpu and motherboard.

I've wondered why someone would go with something other than Intel, given their monopoly (this may be reason enough, but it's sort of asking for problems)

An interesting previous post on the intel vs. amd:

http://forum.cakewalk.com/tm.aspx?m=2660354