Ed, I’d like to say thank you for first of all acknowledging the problem and secondly for your apology.
That is appreciated, and as the saying goes the first step to recovery is to admit you have a problem!
The advice to sanitise a PC as a dedicated DAW is however not particularly helpful to most of us. Unless you are running a full studio this is simply not practical, but in that case you are more likely to have a high end RME or other audio interface.
Objectively Steinberg’s audio interfaces are far more likely to be in home studios, where users do not have the luxury or a dedicated machine and/or need the flexibility and convenience of having other stuff running. That is certainly the case for me, and a requirement to run nothing else would absolutely be a deal breaker.
My personal experience is that the drop outs occur when there is significant hard disk activity saving files while the interface is capturing. I’m no expert but my sense is it must be related to the driver somehow being interrupted by that disk activity. If that gives you any idea please try to fix this, because otherwise my UR44 is an excellent interface, that is unfortunately badly let down by this issue.
Many thanks and Happy Christmas!