I don’t know what’s changed, but part way through working on a small orchestral piece Dorico6 started to freeze when I wanted to access device setup. I’ve been into the preferences and emptied the audio cache, I’ve re-downloaded Dorico through Steinberg Download Manager and reinstalled it. It’s running on a Dell Precision 3570 laptop Windows11 1TB SSD with 64GB RAM. I’ve deleted temporary files and run a disk defragmenter. Still, it freezes and the only way to end it is to get Task Manager to crash the program. Also, I notice the VST audio engine is still running after crashing Dorico, so I end that task, as well. Restarts make no difference. I went into user/appdata/local/steinberg/dorico/cache and deleted the contents. Because the program freezes, I can’t get it to do a crash dump. Once I’ve crashed the program, I can start it again, but if I go to device setup, it will immediately freeze again. I’m only using the built in audio service of the laptop (Realtek), my headphones are directly plugged in and I turned Bluetooth off to make sure it wasn’t the cause.
Sadly this will not help with your original problem, but if one uses Task Manager to end Dorico, one should expect that the audio engine will continue to run rather than shutting down automatically.
Can you start up Dorico and immediately run a Diagnostic Report from the Help menu and forward the resulting desktop file here?
Dorico Diagnostics.zip (630.6 KB) I thought that I would need the report to be created at the moment of impact 
(the moment of the crash), but maybe not. Here it is attached.
When I reinstalled Dorico from the Steinberg Download Manager, I didn’t uninstall it first; just installed it over the top. The next thing I was going to try was to uninstall Dorico, go into the registry and delete all references I could find of Dorico, (don’t worry, I know my way around the registry) then restart, then do a completely new install.
Finally, if all else fails, I bought this refurbished laptop recently with Windows 11 already installed, and will do a completely clean install of Windows 11 to my satisfaction. I don’t know how dirty this particular installation is.
This is something that @Ulf, the Steinberg audio expert will probably need to advise on.
I suspect it’s some problem with audio drivers.
Tonight, I completely uninstalled Dorico, deleted as many entries in the Registry as I could find, restarted the laptop, then installed Dorico from the Steinberg Download Assistant. Exactly the same issue. Also, yesterday, I did go into the device manager and uninstalled the audio drivers and restarted the laptop, which causes it to reinstall the drivers, often fixing any problems one might have, but unfortunately, that also had no effect. Tonight, I’ve been backing up the laptop and preparing installation media for blowing away the current installation and doing a complete new installation of Windows 11 tomorrow. Very annoying, all this.
Of course, if one is working to a deadline, a day can be too long to wait–and tomorrow one might be too busy to do what one can today–but otherwise, waiting to see what @Ulf can deduce from your Diagnostic Report might save a bundle of work if he can pinpoint the problem.
Sorry for joining so late, but I was on the Baltic Sea the whole weekend.
@davidcundy , is there any chance for a remote screen sharing session with you?
If not, please provide me with mini dumps of Dorico and the VSTAudioEngine processes. If you don’t know how to do that, please google for “how to create minidumps with process explorer”. Thanks
Hi Ulf, I’m envious of you being on the Baltic Sea. We only have one big sea that surrounds the whole country here in Australia. I decided to bite the bullet and rebuild the entire workstation, which I did today. I deleted the partitions and then did a completely clean install of Windows 11 onto the laptop. That seems to have fixed the problem, because tonight I installed Dorico 6 and opened some projects and they are all working perfectly and when I click on Edit>device setup, I have no problems accessing the audio engine settings. I realise this doesn’t quite answer the question as to what was happening, so I’ll still download the Process Explorer and run the mini-dumps. I remembered, today, that when I first got this laptop a few weeks ago and installed Dorico, I had problems getting the audio to stabilise to playing through the headphones, so it’s quite possible there was always an issue with instability of the audio engine. Doing a complete install has probably fixed that. Cheers.
G’day mate,
yes, I know the big lake around your country, around 30 years ago I lived some time in Sydney, with a gorgeous view to the Pacific and the harbour as my playground for my Laser 2. So that was equally nice compared to the Baltic Sea, I’d say 
And good to hear that the start from scratch helped you. I had similar cases in the past, audio engine did not want to start due to weird driver settings or so. Usually I get it to work again after tinkering around with the settings and preferences.
I think it won’t come back any more and you should be fine. Should it still come back, get in touch again. Cheers mate