Newbie considering purchasing 8.5 Producer

I am messing with the demo now. 

Can I make vertical grid lines on my track view?

Any thoughts on the best way to explore this app over the next few days? Just record and shut up..... or???

Yes you can have vertical lines. Right click the time ruler and 'view options' appears in the list and click that and then you get 'vertical rules' - either none or behind or in front of the clips. There's probably other ways too. There usually is. People have shortcuts for everything.

Testing it is simple in my opinion. Record, use and abuse and explore what you would normally use. Performance is the most important thing. Absolutely no use having a fully loaded DAW if it crashes or freezes or just doesn't work as intended. Sonar can do most things. Unleash your inner producer and pretend it's the industry standard.

The 64bit mob will be along to help. I'm in the dark ages of 32bit

I still use flint and have only recently discovered fire

I believe there should be a new Sonnox 64bit driver that you may want to download.  That will likely solve the problem with it.  Bitbridge with in Sonar allows you to use 32bit plugins in 64bit mode.  However, some still don't behave properly.  There is a product available called jBridge that can be pruchased (I think around 20.00 USD) that  does a  better job than the built in bitbridge  and has a little more flexibility in dealing with  program close outs that hang with some of the 32bit plugs.  If you make the plunge I would definitely recommend acquiring it.

http://jstuff.wordpress.com/jbridge/

have had a little trouble with 32 bit plugs in 64 bit Sonar-i get application freezes when loading 32 bit Sonnox but not 32 bit Voxengo??

Those issues can be dealt with using the bitbridge feature (or, in a very few cases the third-party alternative j-bridge). However, for evaluation purposes I'd recommend simply running the 32-bit version. The 32- and 64-bit versions of SONAR are identical as far as the user experience goes. No point wasting your time running down technical problems at this stage.

Are they all VST plug-ins or are they Direct X and VST (VST was invented by Steinberg and DX by Cakewalk) if you are having problems with one type and not the other it might be the "wrapper" program (this is used to make both VST and DX work on the same system).

You might look at the Asio Driver settings as well.