@npudar I don’t recall everything I changed. For the most part, following the document provided by GP for optimizing Windows would cover most of it. What I found troubling is that the standard means of killing Windows Defender did not resolve the problem. It continues to get triggered every few minutes anyway. And those triggers would cause short instances of dead audio. I had to go into group policy and totally kill the service where it could never run to get it to stop. Once I did that, I had no further problems.
I can’t recommend doing this because it leaves a computer vulnerable to all the things defender is designed to block. I determined it was acceptable in my case because the computer involved is never allowed to connect to the internet except for when I have a long break between gigs. I use those as opportunities to perform all updates and make sure everything is running properly before the next gig. That’s typically a once each year December thing.