Sadly, a few protests now is nothing in comparison if Harris would have won. The Republican party already had preemptive lawsuits to challenge the election results before election day and the results would have been contended for months. There was a high likelihood of a repeat of Jan. 6th 2021 on Jan. 6th 2025 from right wing milita groups.

Any chance you are using a Thunderbolt device such as a network adapter or external drives? I had the issue on a NUC 10 where it would randomly drop the TB devices every few weeks and occasionally appear to be frozen. The latest firmware update finally took care of it.

Awesome, glad that helped and thanks for the update!

I wonder if there is something going on with scheduling waits that is impacting the audio process. I would first try upping the CPU units in Processors->Advanced settings for the VM, bump it to something like 200. Otherwise, if you over subscribing your CPU cores, try temporarily dropping the number of cores subbed out to your VMs to match the physical host to see if it helps, since that could help resolve scheduling issues as well.