PROBLEM SOLVED!!
Once I physically removed the Creative X-Fi XTreme PCI sound card, I am able to comfortably run 35+ instances of the above Massive test with no popping.
It seems that this PC just had too many audio interfaces (the sound card, the Saffire Pro24, the UltraNova interface, etc). The Creative card was in this system because it is a spare development PC I had laying around. It has a good Core i7 processor and plenty of RAM so I was trying to save a buck by re-commissioning an older PC to be my music, and for a while I thought that plan wasn't going to work. Thank god it wasn't a Windows 8 issue. I had tried disabling the Creative card via control panel, and it was showing it as disabled, but apparently that wasn't enough.
I'm thrilled with Cubase as my primary DAW for the time being... I'm already finding the hardware CMC controllers indispensible, but I do plan to re-visit Ableton now that I know the earlier popping problems were not entirely due to differences in DAW.
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