Well yeah .... anytime I power up or down gear and forget to turn my monitors off first, I'll get a nasty little pop. That's pretty much normal.
However, I don't have any problems when I switch applications.
This may just be something with your drivers and Windows .... when one application releases them and the other initializes them. I'm just speculating on this.
I use the onboard sound chip of my mobo for the Windows audio device and S/PDIF it's output to my MOTU so Windows never takes control of it's driver. So this may be why I've never experienced any anomalies of that nature.
As far as the sequencing and wave editing programs that I switch to and from that are utilizing the MOTU driver .... nope, no clicks or pops.
I guess that doesn't really answer the question of whether or not it's normal. I would be inclined to think so. I mean, Cubase is using the device with ASIO drivers and at whatever bit depth/sample rate the project is at .... then, all of the sudden, Windows wants to use it (likely at 16bit/44.1kHz) with WDM drivers.
Sounds like a prime circumstance for some kind of audible circuit fart emanating from the output of the interface.
