I always get glitching with taskm open. But if in taskm you switch the priority of taskm to low it will disappear. Also check the priority of cubase it should be set to high. In the past I have had to set that too, when on XP.
Having taskm open wile working is not a good idea anyway as it constantly polls the cpu...

Thank you so much!

Changing the priority seems to have worked when running taskmanager - brilliant

I have also been getting quick spikes and crackles when opening/closing some GUI's and VST's inside Cubase - even just opening an empty cubase FX window ( where you can edit inserts/sends ect..) has been problematic.  Closing the GUI of some plugs also gives a delayed spiking and audio crackles!

Setting Cubase priority to "realtime" in TaskManager has helped with this also!

The strangest thing is that all these things are greatly improved if I change the buffer setting from my usual 256 to another size and then back to 256 again in the HDSP menu after Cubase has been started?? Most of the problems go away completely!? The only spikes that still happen after this are occasionaly when opening the Cubase inserts/sends menu.

I noticed that the HDSP driver is set to "normal" as is the HDSPmixer process - is it best to change these to a higher priority aswell?

Thanks again for the help!

Good to know about the "realtime" setting, thanks for the info.

I tried the most recent Matrox drivers and the ones which preceeded the ones I had installed - sadly things only got worse - i'll check to see if I can find some older versions.

I found quite a few posts online recommending that "busmastering" should be unchecked for this card but there has been no options to do so with any of the drivers/software I have tried so far.

Thanks for all the help - things have improved alot. The quest for spike free operation continues....

Update

Have now tried with all the Matrox drivers but none resolve the issues.  Oh well! I just have to cross my fingers and run cubase at "realtime" since "High" does not help and i'll have to live with the occasional spikes.

Thanks again, best wishes ;D

Thats the thing - I don't have this "bus master" setting! Im guessing maybe because its a PCIe card instead of PCI?

Sadly it Just makes the clicks/pops happen more often :C

I think youre right about the Matrox drivers though - the card is perhaps a bit old but I had heard great things about it.

Funny you say Radeon, it was a Radeon 3540 that I had originally but the fan began making a god awfull noise. No amount of cleaning improved it so I chose the Matrox for its fanless design!

Which card do you use? I'm only using one 22" LCD monitor.

I also run the CPU without overclocking - when I first built the PC I OC'd it too, just to see if it could be done, but I returned to default for DAW duties since I heard it was counter-productive for this. You've got me wondering now hmmm!

Wow - 25% is substancial indeed!

I shall definately look into performing a modest overclock and finding a radeon 5450.  Thanks so much for all your time and info, it is much appreciated ;D

PS regarding the radeon 5450 - which type did you get memory wise? I notice your xp64 and wont have the 4GB memory limit like me - therfore I had tried to get a GFX card with minimal memory requirements so it didn't eat into any system memory.

I suppose I could always consider going 64bit too and fitting more RAM!