HS6 no synthesizer, no audio, sound engine not running under Win7

 After a fresh install of Cakewalk Sonar Home Studio 6 on my new ASUS eee netbook running Windows 7, HS6 found no sythesizers in my Win7 (32bit) system. No sound came from any software synth inserted. No audio emerged from playing an audio track. In hindsight, and not obvious at first, the audio engine would not start or run.

Possible Solutions:

1) For no selectable software synthesizer output under Options-> Midi Device - Outputs, this is actually a Windows 7 issue.

  Personally I searched, downloaded and installed Bassmidi, a .sf2 sound font file called "GeneralUser GS FluidSynth v1.44.sf2". This got midi playback working by choosing a Midi device output in HS6. There are other software synth/drivers/sound fonts available online which may solve the issue, but apart from Coolsoft's CoolSoft VirtualMIDISynth, which appears to be based on BassMidi libraries, I haven't tried them.

  Setting a system midi device output didn't, however, resolve the audio engine problem.

  2) For there are no drivers to choose from in HS6->Options->Audio->Advanced->driver mode, I searched, downloaded and installed the ASIO4ALL driver. This found all the audio chips on my notebook and works. I am not aware of any alternatives.

3) For when, after selecting ASIO as the driver mode in HS6, restarting and getting notification messages that ASIO4ALL is receiving from Home Studio, but the audio engine still won't start:
  Exit HS6 and open AUD.INI located at "%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\Cakewalk\SONAR Home Studio 6\AUD.INI" in notepad.

Find the entry for DriverID=-1 and change it to DriverID=0

Restart HS6. For me this final step got the sound engine working in a standard user Windows 7 login. Hope it helps!

Dom