Sorry I missed your previous response to my post, BrotherJack. As someone who's done a lot of video post-production work (and those workflows/pipelines can get extremely complicated when you start layering in visual effects, etc) I've always found that it's best to create a workflow that utilizes each application as it was designed to do. Just a quick snapshot of how I'd approach a video project:
All raw video clips are brought into the video editor (formerly used Vegas, now use Premiere Pro), the video project is pieced together. If visual effects are required, I'll spin off into After Effects. Once I have picture lock, I'll send the video to After Effects if need be, or for color correction, etc. and I'll send the audio to Sonar/Audition. The reference video track within the audio application is a low-resolution, resource-friendly temp track because I never want my final picture render to come out of an audio application, especially if it's being processed elsewhere for VFS or color correction. I want the video element to be refined/polished one way, and the audio refined/polished another. So once each of those entities has gone through its paces, they are brought back into the video editor where I've got one video file and one audio file, and my final render happens there.
(Of course, the Adobe suite allows much of this to happen without the intermediary renders, but for the purposes of your software applications I just suggested how I'd do it under those circumstances.)
However, I will now take this opportunity to put my foot in mouth: I have never attempted to use Sonar to
export video, so perhaps it does need some improvement if in fact it exports unusable video. All I'm suggesting is that you use a reference video track within Sonar so you can line things up correctly, see how the audio plays with your video etc, but then only export the audio. It is an extra step to bring the final audio back into the editor to line up with the video for a final master export, but I think pretty typical for a video post-production workflow.
At any rate, sounds like you've come up with a solution anyway, so that's good to hear.
A bit strange that you never heard back from Cakewalk, though. Did you follow up with them at all? I haven't had to contact them many times for technical issues, but when I did I was never left hanging like that.