Kontakt, Halion Sonic SE, VST Instruments and Cubase 8 Pro

Dman,
I don’t want to be a pain, but you DID try with multi processing OFF in both samplers, right? I reinstalled the whole thing recently, and when I was about to switch on multiprocessing for Halion, it advised against it. So I switched it off for Kontakt as well and I have been fine since.
As far as I understand it, Cubase uses the virtual cores from the hyperthreading for ASIOGuard, and that might conflict with the samplers. And since hyperthreading is designed to be transparent to the operating system and other software, Halion and Kontakt have no way of knowing of they’re getting in the way of ASIOGuard or not…

All the best,
Benji