Question is kind of self-explanatory above.  I'd rather not set the color of each individual track.  I know you can set multiple tracks at once in the upper-left but I'd like them to follow the color scheme listed in the preferences.  Is this possible?  What's the point of these colors if they don't work?

And again here, related question... as you can see I have no track colors set, why are these tracks the 3 different colors that they are?  Where are they getting the colors from?
 

It appears you have made some adjustments in Preferences / Colors.
Sometimes when you make these changes you change default colors.
 
Your track color appears to be defaulting to the same color as your track number color (yellow).
Also track color changes with different Track types and sometimes it is random.
Which version of sonar is this ?
 
I know in early versions colors were not like they are now. they did an update about a year ago in Sonar Platinum and fixed a lot of things, along with adding the Sonar theme editor.

Have you checked the foreground colors of those clips in the Clip Properties Inspector? The inspector pane shown in your screenshots is the Track Properties Inspector.

When you create new midi tracks, the track colors should alternate with the colors set in the preferences. If you create 20 new midi tracks, first has color 1, second color 2, until track 10, and track 11 starts with color 1 again. When you move a track up or down, it keeps its color. The same for audio tracks, just with their own colors.
 
However, when you duplicate a track, all duplicates will have the same color as the original. So, I guess your tracks with the same color have been created by duplicating.
 
There was an option to select which color from the preferences is used for a particular track, but this option was removed when track colors where introduced, even when the colors from the preferences are still used, if the track has no track color assigned.

chuckebaby
It appears you have made some adjustments in Preferences / Colors.
Sometimes when you make these changes you change default colors.
 
Your track color appears to be defaulting to the same color as your track number color (yellow).
Also track color changes with different Track types and sometimes it is random.
Which version of sonar is this ?
 

Yes these are colors that I imported from 8.5 --> X3e --> Platinum now.  In 8.5 they used to work exactly the way you would think they would work but in X they messed it all up.  Guess it's still a bit messy?

ralf
When you create new midi tracks, the track colors should alternate with the colors set in the preferences. If you create 20 new midi tracks, first has color 1, second color 2, until track 10, and track 11 starts with color 1 again. When you move a track up or down, it keeps its color. The same for audio tracks, just with their own colors.
 
However, when you duplicate a track, all duplicates will have the same color as the original. So, I guess your tracks with the same color have been created by duplicating.
 
There was an option to select which color from the preferences is used for a particular track, but this option was removed when track colors where introduced, even when the colors from the preferences are still used, if the track has no track color assigned.

Your answer appears to be the correct one which is not the answer I was hoping to hear.

If I didn't totally miss it - before you can change the color you have, to have a track selected and then will it show up the option to change the background or clip color.