Vquestor, you are exactly right. Steinberg could easily deteriorate!!!

At this point, I favor Cubase SX for live performances. It has better effects, latency and overall quality. In addition, you can run more than one application (VSTi, VoiceMachine, etc.) at the same time. In Cakewalk I have not found a way to run Live - Styler and Kontakt at the same time - Playing live. You can record both which is good enough for audio recording.

The bottomline for me still remains to run all applications as standalone versions. This minimizes dependencies on more than one operating system, e.g., Windows & Cubase SX, etc. Oh well, I am very close to my goal.