Sluggish noisy playback with saturation

[staticmaker]

OK... Sorry if I put this in the wrong category. Not sure where it goes:
I"m having a sluggish, distorted playback under certain circumstances. it acts like a lack of memory issue when it isn't.
Scenario:
*Badass PC- lots of power and memory.
*About 40 tracks (9hvy guitars/guitar rig -which I know is a memory hog),
ezdrummer, RefxNexus, Schepps(on all ch's)
*I put Kclip, Aphex, Lexicon, Maserati,on aux busses (about 8 total)

EVERYTHING runs flawlessly UNTIL one of two things:
Either when I "copy" a plugin to another track (by holding "ctrl" and dragging to next channel)...causes staticky noise from the new channel...usually this happens with Guitar Rig.
OR
I save the project as a template and then use it for a next project. When I open a flawlessly working project template for a new project ....even when I record the first track in the new project the project barely plays....and acts like i've maxed out the memory. i.e. Playback is slow and distorted.

Each time I make an improvement on the previous project template, I resave it and rewrite the previous one. I believe that this act alone is creating the issues but why is the template holding onto certain info (like mem allocation or something) that's making the system believe that there's more going on than there actually is.....thus causing slow distorted playback.

The overall distorted sound I"m getting kinda sounds like a combination of all my saturation instances being too much but it's not

Hope someone can help.