Sorry for late reply but looks like the other guys got to it already. As said above i dont think it necessarily matters too much which order they are installed in but its usually just better to install the previous ones first. I did install x1 AFTER platinum and still got v-vocal. Platinum just scanned and picked it up normally 

Thought long and hard and decided to just go with Platinum only (right now) because I have very little hands on experience with SONAR (I've been using Reason a lot more -- it's just fun!) anyway, and this V-Vocal everyone is talking about I've never even heard of anyway lol.  After installation, the only real problem has been Celemony, but I have a ticket in with them right now -- it simply will NOT let me register Melodyn from within SONAR.  Also, the CCC install says I have installed Rapture Pro, but I don't see a stand-alone installation like I had before -- is that something I need to get separately?  My older versions of SONAR are X2Producer and X3Producer so if there are any goodies I can load up separately (without loading the whole packages) in there you folks think I might need that aren't in Platinum, let me know if you would.

The reasons I ended up with so many (thus far) unused versions of Cakewalk's flagship DAW are many and varied, but I can see it's a beast and I am at a point where I'd like to sit down and learn it in and out as much as a hobbyist can anyway.

V-vocal was melodynes predecessor before when cakewalk was owned by Roland. I loved,still use it and melodyne (i also had issue registering and got help from them) depending what i want to do. But im not here to sell you on V-vocal lol that was just an example of an older plugin transferring over. As far as the plugin not show up... do you mean you just cant find it in soft synths? make sure u look under VST3 in the soft synths section.

Epilogue: All done, all went well and my Win7x64 setup runs SONAR very, very well so far.  Thanks everyone for the helpful advice!

Good news Stephen.
 
Love your username btw!!