p.s. is the keyboard working ok now?

Don't forget you need to reset as well as rescan if you haven't already. 

First, thanks Swamptooth, that helped, got rid of those unassigned synths. But no, the keyboard isn't happening yet... we've changed its behavior some, the project I'm working on has turned into an experimental workspace just trying to make things work. Sometimes I get the sound I want when I create a SoftSynth track, then I create another track and get nothing. Christ, give me portastudio and a piece of tape please. Now I'm having the added problem of Sonar crashing... think I'm going to walk away from this for a while, thanks for the help.
 
 

You can't walk away when you're losing. 
 
Where are your dll's located?  The 32bit ones should be in ProgramFilesx86/Cakewalk/vstplugins and the 64bit ones in ProgramFiles/Cakewalk/vstplugins.   I don't know what might happen if the 32 get in the 64 hole, or vice versa, but would guess that a 32 would work OK in the 64 bit house, but not the other way around.  I would guess this could only happen if you had manually installed dlls.  Did you?
 
Are they all there?  Or are they hiding in a Steinberg directory?
 
When you re-scan your plugins, is the Options set to scan the parent-directories where all these dlls live?  A parent-directory includes all the subdirectories beneath it.
 
Do you have duplicate dlls lurking about?  Worse is having dlls with same name but are different sizes, which indicates different versions.  Right-click, Properties, Versions to see, and cut and paste the suspect dlls to a TEMP directory.  Then rescan.
 
OK, now you can quit.

I had almost the exact same problem recently. After weeks of hair-pulling, the only solution was a complete uninstall and clean install of X3.  Everything worked perfectly afterwards.

So, I have some time now, guess I'll try to make this work again... current situ... I've increased my ram from 4gb to 12gb, not specifically for this issue but overall performance... as far as Sonar's concerned, it just freezes faster. What's now happening is, I can open my audio files, they work fine... the project that I've started that is completely midi tracked will open and play, there is a SoftSynth track (a Clav part) that I created and I seem to be able to play it, though I am getting some latency with it... but if I try to add another SoftSynth track, any track, the program crashes completely, every time. I've uninstalled and reinstalled Sonar twice and upgraded from X3a to X3e, any suggestions welcome.

When you've uninstalled did you go into the registry and delete the necessary keys?

No, didn't know about that... is there a step by step?

http://www.cakewalk.com/S...n-Install-Instructions

Ok, did all that, followed the instructions, deleted the registry keys, reinstalled from fresh downloads, including the X3e update... but there was no change in the performance of the program. If I'm in my midi project and try to add SoftSynth track, the program crashes.