I have VE on two PC's and my main Mac daw. Everything works well, except on one PC I'm getting random audio drops, crackles and glitches. It's on a 2core Duo with Win7. Nothing running on it except VE Pro. One thing I noticed, and I've noticed this with some of the later versions of VE2 on my other machines - the graphics in VE can be related to the audio glitches. There is definitely something going on that is graphic related. 

Since I have an ongoing issue with graphics with VE2 on another machine, a P4 3.0, I tried the same thing that I have to use in that one - which is close or hide any VE graphic while playing back. I tried the same on the VE Pro/ 2core  duo machine, and all the glitches went away. 

Also, when I open the GUI of any Vienna suite plug inside of the VE Pro slave, the audio drop outs get significantly worse, unplayable at that point. Close the plug GUI's and the glitches reduce greatly, though still occasionally there. Hide all VE GUI's and the glitches go away completely. 

It makes me wonder if others that are having audio glitches are running into the same thing. 

Any ideas on how to solve this?   

No, not even close. I get this on a session that is using about 3.98 total gigs out of 8 gigs. I can hold down a single 4 voice sustained string chord and it will have glitches. Watching the CPU usage in the task manager while I hold down the chord, it's showing anywhere from 26% for 4 notes up to 50 or 60% if I hold like 24 notes at once. But, it will have glitches even with 4 notes at 30%. Once in a while it will suddenly shoot up to 80% for a fraction of a second, then come back down. But the glitches happen even when the CPU usage is holding steady at 30%. 

Also, I can run the exact same multi set up and patches playing many tracks at once in Bidule (through my audio card) without any issues at all. So, it's not that I'm running close to max. I never had an issue until trying to use VE Pro. 

And I don't use remote desktop so it wouldn't be that. 

What else would cause it? 

Latency is 512

Thread is 2

Graphics is built in intel graphics accelerator driver - Intel Core 2 @ 1.68Ghz, 8 gigs ram, graphics set to 256 meg in bio

I don't have a graphics slider (at least I haven't found one) but I did go back yesterday and change the performance to "best" in the system prefs. It does have various choices for the 3D and video settings in the Intel graphics. I'm not sure what of those are significant to VE. It's OpenGL. Here is the list of the choices:

Asynchronous filp - on/off

Triple Buffereing - on/off

Flipping Policy - flip/blit

Depth Buffer Bit Depth  - default/16 Bit / 24 Bit

Force S3TC texture Compression - on/off

Force FXT1 Texture Compression - on/off

Driver Footprint memory - normal/low/high

Texture Color Depth - Desktop Color Depth/16 bit per texel / 24 bit per texel

Anisotropic Filtering - application control / on / off

Video Quality Section:

Enable Film Mode detection

Sharpness Enhancement - enable application settings override (with silder min to max)

Noise reduction - enable application setting override

Any of those settings have a bearing on VE or am I going to have to get a dedicated graphics card? 

No, sorry it's a 1.86Ghz core2duo, one of the early ones and one of my older slaves. But it's still very functional as a slave. I've been using it daily for several years and haven't had an issues with it until using VE Pro. I think you are right, I need to get a graphic card. 

Thanks for the help.