Need knowledgeable help re: glitches

[rockmachine]

Hey guys, I know many here are very PC savvy so am coming here for help, hopefully. I have a PC, Windows 7 Pro, i7, 16gb ram, running Cubase Artist 8.5, M-Audio firewire 1814 soundcard and M-Audio Anniversary 4x4 MIDI interface.. Everything was running well/perfectly until a couple of days ago when I started to get weird, if not bizarre behaviour from the audio outputs. First, when loading my VSTs, MIDI input to them and audio output from them started becoming glitchy, as in regardless of my envelope settings, things like the releases became truncated, choppy, holding down a note on my keyboard would not even keep a steady sustain. I can play a track and it has a certain volume level until a second one comes in and then there's a drop in volume. I would say it points to something in Cubase, the usual suspect when almost anything goes wrong but changing all sorts of things in VST or Preferences hasn't changed or helped anything. Tried a search and can't find any answers that have helped so far, so any help is appreciated.

[rockmachine]

Also peeps, I have Reason 7, so just loaded it for comparative purposes, and everything is working perfectly, as usual. If only Steinberg could ever put out something that you could depend on like you can Reason.

[rockmachine]

This is not the solution, just ended up being a solution: I opened another song which had been playing as it should have been before this and I had no issues at all with it. So it got me to thinking that perhaps, it was some kind of weird corruption within that song itself. Now I admit I had used a template and been messing around erasing a few things, but who knows what I might have done inadvertenly? So I took my 3 tracks, exported them as MIDI files to my desktop, opened a brand new song file and imported them, created one each of Monopoly, Zerba and Bazille, loaded the sounds I had used before and who knows why, but the issues resolved themselves, whatever they were. I am going to now erase the original song as I don't want to be near anything that might have introduced the problems in the first place. So, a solution, if not the solution.