PT10 Sound goes fuzzy / distorted randomly; also get hard freezes

[dan0082]

I have PT10.3.7, also have EZdrummer and Melodyne plugins, along with an MBox 3.

First, I do get hard freezes, in general... About 20% of the time, the PC will "recover" after a 20+sec freeze, and I can resume work. The other 80% of the time, it will just straight up freeze (screen still displays; just frozen with no response from anything), and the only way out is the reset button.

I can deal with the issue, above, but just mentioned it in case it helps. The primarily reason for this post is because of a [potentially] separate issue I'm having, where I will be working in a session, and the sound will suddenly start coming out of my speakers in an incredibly distorted/fuzzy manner. Note that this is not a subtle "audiophile"-type complaint... it is VERY noticeably distorted/fuzzy. The only way I can get it to stop is to close PT down, unplug the MBox 3, plug it back in, and restart PT (though, I believe sometimes I've needed to restart my PC entirely to get the issue to go away). Keep in mind that most of the time PT works just fine without this fuzzy sound issue, so I'm guessing it's nothing hardware related.

As far as I can remember, there was only one time when this happened that I actually got an error pop-up in PT along with it. Unfortunately, I was pressing a key when it popped up, so it disappeared before I could read it, but it said something about "buffer."

I know nothing about buffer settings, etc, so it could simply be that I have some less-than-optimal settings along those lines, but I was hoping someone might have an idea of whether it's that or something else entirely that is leading to this distortion issue?

Secondarily, any ideas on what might be causing the [separate?] hard freezes I'm getting would be greatly appreciated. I read through some other posts on the freeze issue, but couldn't find anything that matched my case (especially w/ the distortion/fuzzy sound issue along with it).

Note my specs on my profile: I do have PT10 installed on my OS-installed SSD, while I save session files to an internal HDD. I'm guessing this isn't an atypical setup (i.e. worthy of causing systematic issues), but just wanted to point it out.

Thank you,
Dan