John Payne
Thanks so much Jonesey.
 
Yes -- now that I look closely I see that some tracks have volume automation lines that run very far out.  How do I kill them?

Best way, open up the automation lanes for each track. Then you can easily see the erroneously placed nodes. I think you right click to delete an individual node. Once you have have dotted lines the envelope is clean

Trimmed the automation lines/tracks, but Export (without setting the range with Cntl A) takes forever.  Still something in this file that extends it way out in time.  

To remove everything after the "end"

• Select All
• Move Now to where the end should be
• Select From Now
• Delete

scook -when I did as you suggested it appeared like a darkend area from the end of the music to way out there indeed was deleted.  But still have same problem.  

That was happening to me and I realized that I had some very long tracks with little info that went way beyond the song ending.  As soon as I truncated the various tracks to the song end, the problem was solved.

If you cannot find and remove the data causing the project to play past the "end" the only way I know to prevent generating a large time consuming export is:

• select all the tracks to export
• select the time range to export
• export the selection

John, I find it's best to get into a habit of preparing for export by first selecting all the tracks and selecting the length on the timeline that I want to export + plus some extra that can later be removed when mastering. Then I always select master as the source. Doing these things ensures that I get what I was expecting to get.