Heh... yeah, it should be pretty obvious which one it is but out of respect for the forum I'll leave its name out of it.
Since this got bumped I'll update my progress (I was just gonna edit my last post instead). I hooked up the M-Audio to try recording some live input (after hunting around for an extra freaking USB cable of all things... I should have a million of those buggers... what the heck? lulz...). Immediately I started noticing the problems I would normally expect. There was pretty distracting latency between hitting the keys and the output (I was using TTS-1 for the test) but I ignored it. I tried recording a little bit with the metronome and the metronome was spedding up/slowing down/crackling/generally being weird. So I started poking around to find some settings to attempt fixing it. Oof... totally different preferences setup than Sonar so I was kind of lost. I did however find the Driver settings. I thought it would be on WDM or something but it was on something called WaveOut which I have never heard of. It seemed kind of sketchy so I checked what else was available. Surprisingly WDM and MME were nowhere to be seen but there was WASAPI which, although I have no idea what the heck that stands for, I had at least heard of before. I switched to that and tried again and kabingi... I was good to go. Metronome worked properly, latency seemed to completely disappear and it was recording the input reasonably well. I noticed a weee bit of barely noticeable scratchiness on some notes but I think it may have been the metronome which uses a horrendous sounding sample. When I played it back without the metronome it sounded nice and clear.
I'm thinking if I hook up the VRM Box as an interface so I can switch to ASIO and figure out how to tweak the buffer settings a little I should be good to go. Not as fantabulous as I first thought due to those little scritchy scratchies but I've basically done next to nothing to tweak it and it is working pretty well. I don't even care if there is some unwanted noise. Just as long as when I render (if I render) it comes out clean and I'd make sure I crank everything I can find to make that happen.
So yeah... live MIDI input a success. Hooray!