Newer CPUs offer a variety of power-saving features. With newer Versions of Windows these features get used, some of them also to improve performance of single-threaded applications. These features do hurt multi-threaded applications that work near system time, i.e. audio applications.

These features are Speedstep (EIST), the C-States (C1e, C3, C6), Core Parking and Turbo Boost.
Speedstep, C1e, C3, C6 allow disabling or throttling of single cpus, and even if that would not hurt, waking those cpus to full power takes time, leading to processing peaks and crackles/drop-outs. 
Core Parking disables single cpus (normally the virtual hyper-threading ones) and is used for OS-based multi-core-scheduling. This also leads to delays on parking/unparking, causing crackles and drop-outs.
Turbo boost enables internal overclocking of single cores/cpus, while at the same time shutting down other cores (keeping temperatures save). while this can raise performance of single-threaded applications by up to 10%, the switching causes delay, causing? yep, crackles/dropouts. If all the C-States are disabled, it should be good, though.

All those delays can additionally hurt bus-communication, causing firewire failures, so if your Firestudio is not working right, even thou you have a nice fat i7, this might be the reason.

So, how to get free of this? As a PC-user, you could go into the bios and explicitly disable these features. But, you may be doing other stuff with your computer, where all this is nice. So, I created an additional power-profile (Vista/Win7 only). 

If you run the batchfile (addconfig.cmd), this profile should be imported and selected. 
IMPORTANT: you need to do this as system adminstrator, which you can select to do by rightclicking on the script.

(Now you can go to your "Power Options" and deselect this profile, if you want to use your computer as a low power media-server. Or to host one instance of Kore-Standalone. Then, before (or while) running the best sequencer of the world, select the "Audio Processing"-Profile, and all is well. )

This profile disables processor idle states, processor throttling, core parking and turboboost.

