I posted this as a bug and some careless mod said can't duplicate, but it's another extraordinarily irritating "feature" of x3: you CAN NOT enter a program (patch) number by number.  No way.  You have to go to the defective Dialog Box "Bank/Patch Change" and mouse in the number from a 128-length pop-down menu.   And THAT defective dialog box will reset the bank number to a void if you didn't go to the trouble of making the instrument a "known" type (regardless of right or wrong) in the inspector for the track.