Yeah I tried all of that. I've about everything I could do just short of wiping the computer clean. I just did that about 3 months ago and it take a few days to put everything back on the computer so I don't want to do that again. lol Today I downloaded reaper just to see if it did the same. It worked flawlessly. I laid down a lot of test tracks with a lot of vst instruments and barely used any cpu. No pops or dro outs. I went back to cakewalk and still ran horribly. I noticed that it shows cakewalk itself using a lot of resources when its running bad, but when actually looking at my system performance outside of the program its barely using anything. So sad to say its something with cakewalk. Cakewalk is the only Daw I've ever used all my life so it hurt pretty bad trying out another Daw. LOL I'll keep trying things if I can think of anything else. I refuse to give up Cakewalk.