An audio "crackle" not present in any other DAW or audio system on my system

[Milkman]

In the end, this was a windows11 system bug that entered my workstation sometime in the last few months just after a windows update, and was bizarrely limited to ONLY Bitwig, out of all other softwares that use the audio system. I did not need to spend a lot of time with BWS support because I solved it before going there.

Im not sure if this was:
-ultimately focusrite's audio driver on windows11 AFTER win11's string of horrible updates
-the windows MIDI stack in whatever state it was in just before the "windows 11 MIDI 2.0 update"
-some other issue, perhaps related to GPU rendering in BWS versus the windows 11 DWM, etc.

I dont have the smoking gun, but the audio system is now perfect after ANOTHER rebuild into a fresh copy of Windows 11's "MIDI 2.0 update". Hopefully this doesnt pop up again, but Im not entirely satisfied it wont based on the terrible feedback coming from win11.