I'm used to SONAR being rock solid. I hadn't used my music computer in a while, and last night I started having some major problems: SONAR would take forever to boot up, with frequent crashes upon opening. In the course of two hours and multiple reboots I never played one note of music. There was additional deterioration over time, until I could boot into Windows and although I could see the desktop, I couldn't open folders, open up the computer to look at the drives to back up files, open the task manager...nothing.
 
I figured maybe my hard drive was dying. I couldn't get into Safe Mode, couldn't recall a System Restore, doing advanced recovery stuff didn't work...nothing. I thought maybe I'd have to reset Windows and start all over. I went to sleep a very unhappy camper.
 
I woke up this morning and thought I'd try something that had worked in the past - turning on Windows and not touching anything for an hour, then coming back. Yup, blue screen. Windows had "collected data to deal with an error." When it was 100% complete, I rebooted.
 
BUT I had done something which in retrospect, was fortuitous: I had disconnected several USB devices "just in case," including my audio interfaces. Windows opened, so I immediately imaged the disk and set a new System Restore point. Yeah! So I reconnected my audio interface, and...
 
Same problem, same error collection. Turned off audio interface, re-booted. Windows opened. This time I checked Device Manager for Sound, Video, and Game controllers.
 
WTF? There was a Bluetooth hands-free audio driver, the AMD HD Audio driver I'd turned off because it screwed things up had been turned back on, there was something called Magic Sound (the name itself is scary), and the Chromecast dongles for both my living room and bedroom TVs had their own drivers.
 
I disabled all of it. SONAR is now loading quickly, not crashing, and super-happy.
 
I think what I learned is this: Drivers ARE a major source of issues. After a Windows update, turn off your real audio interface(s), turn on the computer, go into Device Manager, turn off all the crap that Windows put in, re-boot, hook up your audio interface(s)...live happily every after. At least that's what happened with me. I hope this helps you.

Thanks for sharing this, Craig. Definitely something to keep in mind should one start experiencing inexplicable "gremlins".

I hate it when things turn back on without me knowing it.

I had a similar experience a few weeks ago. Not only had widows turned all of my disabled devices back on, the default sample rate for my real interface had been changed also. I had forgotten about the windows playback devices settings and in a panic I came here screaming that the sky was falling. Thankfully Scook pointed me in the right direction and now my rig is running smooth as ever.

I had a similar experience when the Windows 10 "Developer Edition" was installed, I kept putting it off until I had to, ultimately I had to go into RegEdit (other than the standard off/on options) and Bios, didn't take to long it was just a bit of an inconvenience, the programming was to profile operations and to enable options that I was not interested in.
 
Good to hear that your system is back in order.

I believe this is a "feature" of any Win 10 installation.
 
In Win 7 and prior, if you disable anything, it stays disabled.

Bristol you are right, but if you know what to do you can permanently disable all of it, not to difficult.

MANTRASKY
I had a similar experience when the Windows 10 "Developer Edition" was installed, I kept putting it off until I had to, ultimately I had to go into RegEdit (other than the standard off/on options) and Bios, didn't take to long it was just a bit of an inconvenience, the programming was to profile operations and to enable options that I was not interested in.
 
Good to hear that your system is back in order.

For us less technically savvy users, could you describe the steps need to achieve this?
 
Cheers
 

Bristol_Jonesey
I believe this is a "feature" of any Win 10 installation.
 
In Win 7 and prior, if you disable anything, it stays disabled.

That wasn't always my experience. Whenever Windows did discovery of hardware, it could recognize devices as new and enable them by default.

https://docs.microsoft.co...drivers/devtest/devcon

Using this tool, perhaps we can discover why devices we disable are being enabled.

For me, the main annoyance comes when the same single monitor is set up both as USB and HDMI. This just means I can move my mouse off the side and not understand where it went.