Audio driver bit depth does not match what is set in preferences (?) plus crackling noises

My Windows 10 installation recently got b0rked, requiring a reformat and reinstallation. I've reinstalled Sonar, all my VSTs, and the latest drivers for my Creative ZxR sound card. Before all the nastiness, I usually ran projects at 96 kHz 24 bit in ASIO mode as set in the audio driver preferences. The driver bit depth is grayed out but showing 24 bit. However, in the program window (transport control?), it shows 96/16 instead of 96/24 (note that these projects have no audio data, only synths). Also, in some projects, it produces a crackling sound, maybe like buffer underruns sound, even if the sampling rate is set to 44 kHz (with the ASIO buffers set to the max, 100 ms, and MIDI buffers set to 2000 ms). My machine is a quad core i7 @ 4.8 GHz and could previously run these same projects at 96/24 without problem. CPU usage doesn't look abnormally high, even now. I don't know if the two problems are related, but they're both pretty irritating, especially the crackling. Any help would be appreciated. 

scook
Set "Record Bit Depth" in Preferences > File > Audio Data

That took care of the bit depth mismatch.
 
[edit]Nevermind this question. I answered it myself by timing the render lengths. It took almost twice as long to render when the audio driver sample rate was set to 96 than when at 44.[/edit]
Followup question: I know that in older versions of Sonar, if the project sampling rate was set to 44.1 (in a PJ containing only synths and no audio data), when you went to export audio, it would always be rendered at 44.1 and then resampled to the export sample rate, even if it was set to say, 96 KHz. Has that been changed now so that it will render at the export rate? Or do I first need to change the audio driver sample rate? (I remember that in the older versions, it wasn't possible to change a project's sample rate like you can now.)