I asked for support and this time I got a quick response from Alex at Yamaha Sydney. Alex was friendly, professional and had some suggestions. So if anyone from Steinberg Europe reads this thread, please email Alex and tell him that you are grateful and planning a bonus/pay rise for him. Seriously. You need people like Alex.
Alex described what Steinberg engineers have said (page 9 of this thread) and then asked the following:
Did it happen without plug-ins?
Did it happen with every audio interface?
Did it happen no matter where the default song was stored?
If I re-initialized Cubase prefs; did it happen and if not, how long did this “hang free state” last?
Last night over 2 hours I removed all plugins. No change. Then removed the Cubase6 settings folder. Problem gone. Put back the plug-ins in small groups (zzzzz) Still gone. Opened an old song. Still OK. Finally, opened a template I created in vs 6.02 and setup Audio connections and saved as a preset; imported MIDI setup. Closed and quit - the hang came back. The only VSTi’s I have in the template are GA3 and Halion 4. I don’t use BFD.
Looking at this logically, it seems to me that it’s not just one plug-in or audio device, since I only just moved from Presonus to TC. I think it’s in the way Cubase writes to an XML file.
The drag is - who has time for this? I did say to Alex that I feel a program of Steinberg’s credentials should be able to throw up a dialog for this. And that if Charlie Steinberg were still at Steinberg, the problem would be gone. That might be a tad harsh, but Alex took it on the chin and just kept on trying to help.
I’m posting this, because perhaps if a few of use try what I did (keep your old Cubase6 folder of course - you can put it back later) we might stumble upon the point at which the new XML files have something bad written into them.
How about a competition? If I find the problem, will I get an upgrade to Nuendo? One of my friends called me an idiot - he has a cracked version of Nuendo and it’s solid as a rock. 