Can't seem to access my asio panel?

Even though I am set up to default new projects to 24 bit depth and 48k sample rate, my system keeps setting up new projects at 16 bit. when I go into preferences/driver settings the audio bit depth says 24 but is greyed out.? I can't alter the settings there at all? below that it shows the asio panel button but it won't let me open the panel or adjust my buffer size for mixing latency. any Ideas gang?

And you need to be in ASIO mode to open the ASIO panel. If you are in another driver mode you cannot access the panel. It sound like your somehow in another driver mode. 
Does the audio interface show as the Playback and Recording timing master? 

It depends on the hardware vendor. It should be in the documentation that came with the interface. The Presonus client software I used was in in the Windows menu and installed under the Presonus folder in "C:\Program Files." Rather than have the client run at startup, I pinned it to my task bar.

scook you are on as always bud... the control for that is in the presonus universal control. I was at a buffer of 512, I put it to 1024 (I do hardware monitoring theougj the board so latency is irrelevant really and I want to ease the strain during mixing by raising the buffer.... though in sonar preferences>audio> driver settings it still shows mixing latency set to fast:
buffers in playback queue: 2
effective latency at 48k stereo is 21.3 msec. (45.5 roundtrip)

They are the same buffer. In the case of ASIO driver mode, the mixing latency section of SONAR simply reports how the ASIO client software (in the case Presonus Universal Control) is configured.

Either make the changes when SONAR is not running or have the SONAR Preference screen open and click apply after altering the values in Universal Control.