Strange. I have never seen that but I do not use the friendly names anymore since switching to MOTU.
With friendly names you get shorter names BUT you miss out on a great feature from MOTU which is naming the input channels on the routing matrix and having that displayed automatically as ASIO input names. Hence I label what is plugged into the interface in the routing matrix (and configs can be saved/restored there) and find it much easier to pick the right input in Sonar. BTW, I also use different MOTU configs to shorten the list of I/O in case when I do not need it (e.g. mixing heavy projects, recording singer/songwriter tracks).
This may not be so relevant to you but worth a try whether this "fixes" that strange behaviour.
BTW friendly names are stored in the AUD.ini file, which accumulates whatever you used over the years. You could try to backup that file and remove all ALIAS names for MOTU and see if that helps.