Audio Hardware Setup! Now it's there, now it's not!

Steinberg Hardware Legacy Steinberg Hardware
10

Today (2016-05-21) the “Audio Hardware Setup” option in the “Devices” menu, aswell as the “Hardware” pane in the MicConsole went missing again!

I noticed something, that I hadn’t noticed before. Every-so-often Cubase almost freezes when it reaches the Hub in the start-up sequence. One can click on the buttons, but nothing happens. The only thing to do is to force-quit Cubase and launch it again. Then the Hub works.

Today I Quit Cubase and relaunched it. And I suffered one of these freezes and had to force-quit and relaunch. The interesting thing is that the “Audio Hardware Setup” option was there before the force-quit/relaunch, but gone after. Could these problems be related in some way.

EDIT!
I’ve done some testing and I can confirm that these problems are connected (if only indirectly). As I’ve said, Cubase stops at the Hub (which comes unresponsive) every-so-often, and the only way to use Cubase is to force-quit it and relaunch. It appears to be this force-quitting that causes the hardware options to disappear.

I did the flowing:

  1. I uninstalled the MR Editor, MR Extension & FW Driver, rebooted, installed “TOOLS for MR V1.7.7” and rebooted again.
  2. I launched Cubase and opened a project. The hardware options were present, as they should.
  3. I quit Cubase and relaunched it. I opened another project and the hardware options were still there. So far so good.
  4. I quit Cubase again and relaunched it. This time I force-quit it.
  5. I relaunched Cubase and opened one of the projects from the hub. This time the hardware options had vanished!
  6. After jumping though hoops 1 & 2 again I got the hardware options back (until the next time…)

Steinberg really needs to look into this:

  1. Why does Cubase become unresponsive, every-so-often, when it reached the Hub in the upstart sequence?
  2. Why does force-quitting (I don’t know if a crash has the same effect) cause the hardware options from the Devices menu and MixConsol to disappear? I can’t see any other menu items or features that are similarly affected.

Bugs like these does nothing to help Steinbergs reputation in the eyes of my clients. Who’s gonna pay for the downtime? Me or the client. I’m sure it’s not Steinberg, is it?