[Darryl Ramm]

You do not have any floppy drives. That would have been too easy. :-(

Thanks for the Sandra report, I do not see anything that looks like a problem.

Yes plugins can cause just about anything. You might also have a corrupted session. Or it could be other stuff. Lets test for plugins first

The quick test for plugins is to remove *all* .aaxplugin files from C:\Program Files\Common Files\Avid\Audio\Plug-Ins. Just move them out of there to anywhere else. The Unused Plugin folder is a handy place for that. Then trash prefs. Start Pro Tools and it will magically put back the default plugins. See now if any of your sessions, including the ones that behaved badly before. (this also specifically gets all your UAD plugins out of Pro Tools... you want to try that). Obviously the actual third party plugins will then be disabled, but this is still a very useful test. If you do not see problems you can move back some of your suspect third party plugins into that plugin folder, start Pro Tools, and see if the problem reappears. If you see problems with only the standard plugins installed then leave all the third party ones uninstalled and keep going....

If that is not it. Try making Pro Tools as easy to run as posible, in the playback engine settings set the playback buffer a large as you can, uncheck "ignore errors" (we want Pro Tools to tell you if it has problems), check "dynamic plugin processing" and set the disk cache to a nice number, say 8GB (you have so much memory...).

If that is not it I would next check the full optimization again. But I'd leave hyper-threading enabled. Turn off WiFi and bluetooth (if you have wired mice and keyboard), and all networking (if you are not relying on cloud iLok) I would also physically unplug every external device possible, control surfaces, USB hubs, Ethernet cables, etc., and just leave the keyboard, mouse, interface, iLok, and one monitor. And I would make sure no other applications are running, no web browsers, no desktop search/indexing software, and definitely no anti-virus software, fully disable all Antivirus software, including from Microsoft. If you are not sure how to disable it uninstall it.

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BTW with such a nice computer the only things I might upgrade in future is use a higher end-GPU than the NVS-310, especially to support more display resolution. And maybe use M.2 PCIe SSDs especially since you have PCIe 3 slots... but it takes a bit of care to get compatible NVMe drives/boot support. But none of that that is not going to cause things like you are seeing.