Finale 2010b

Windows 8

Good morning

About 7 years ago I bought Finale 2010. I have been very satisfied with it. I decided to improve the orchestral sounds, so 9 months ago I bought GPO5. 

This worked well with the Finale except for occasional distortion in loud tutti passages. This was bearable. This week, without warning, I have extreme distortion on playback which is not bearable. Also it seems to produce an irregular beat in the music. This affects all 3 libraries. When I play a piece through Midi, there is no distortion.

I have turned everything off and everything on. I have uninstalled Finale 2010 and installed it. I have uninstalled GPO5 and installed it. Still unbearable distortion.  When I had a minor distortion on Finale before I bought GPO5, I turned the Quality knob from 100 to 10 and it was eradicated. I think I got this tip from this page.

I have downloaded the free trial Finale 25.5 and everything works fine – including GPO5. I have 807GB free out of 919GB on my computer. I have followed  the instructions in the ‘Distorted sound in the ARIA standalone’ and they did not alter the distortion,

1. Could someone tell me if there is a magic switch I need to fiddle with?
2. If there isn’t a magic switch, do I need to uninstall/install something?
3. If none of the above is feasible, if I upgraded to Finale 25.5, could it be guaranteed that the distortion would go away?
4. Why has this distortion appeared from nowhere?

Yours, in hope, Jon