Until you got to the restart versus shutdown part, I was wondering if maybe plugins loaded in Control Room inserts might already be active in the hub since Control Room is Cubase-wide, rather than project-specific. However, the shutdown/restart distinction got me curious. It turns out there is a difference (besides the powering down of the computer) in behaviors, at least by default, and it’s quite different from my (historical) thinking on the two options.
Here’s a write-up that explains the differences and mentions reasons for using one or the other in certain circumstances:
Short version, at least by default since Windows 8, when you use shutdown it uses something called Fast Startup, which saves Windows kernel state, to make booting back up faster (especially if using hard disks instead of SSDs). By contrast Restart fully clears all system states, so it is more thorough than shutdown.
While it’s not clear what the difference would be with respect to your situation (i.e. what is in the kernel state on your system that affects Cubase startup performance? – perhaps something related to audio interface drivers???), it does, at least potentially, explain why there might be a difference in some scenarios.
You can, however, disable Fast Startup. It is in the “choose what the power button does” section of Power Options within Control Panel. I’m on Windows 10, not 11, but I just checked my settings and verified that I’d turned it, along with some other options that were annoying me, off – probably long ago by now (maybe even a carryover from my Windows 8.1 settings when upgrading to Windows 10).
A search for how to do this on Windows 11 looks like it is done similarly, but there are some potential complications (this is also true for Windows 10) if the options aren’t immediately visible on your system, so here is a link with the information (one of the first that came up, not an endorsement of this particular brand of PC):