So after all of this I was also still having problems in some projects similar to the post above. Some would crash after opening, some would just hang after opening. After fighting with this stuff for waaaay too long, I figured out what was going on and have some suggestions for anyone else who is still having problems or considering upgrading to Melodyne 4. (This post here is one of the problems I was having before I realized it was due to Melodyne 4:
http://forum.cakewalk.com/Project-becomes-unresponsive-shortly-after-opening-m3537360.aspx)Problems included:
1.) Project would crash on start up
2.) Project would hang indefinitely on start up
3.) Unbounced melodyne V3 data would be lost after upgrading to V4.
I resolved all of these problems by reverting back to the old version of Melodyne and bouncing all Melodyne clips. Since the upgrade to V4 requires you to save the project with inability to go back to earlier versions of Melodyne, I had to pull a few projects from backup after they were saved as V4. ALWAYS BACK UP YOUR PROJECTS.
Basically don't upgrade to Melodyne 4 until you have gone back to all projects you care to ever go back to and bounce ALL Melodyne clips. Aside from making sure you have no Melodyne v3/v2 data in the project, this ensures no Melodyne editor windows are saved open in the project, which can also cause projects to become unopenable.
When bouncing make sure you have solo and DIM off so the clips aren't bounced as muted. (DIM must be off even if mute is off- seems like a bug? this has been happening since switching to Platinum off of X3.). Just make sure to verify each bounced clip has sound after bouncing. IF you bounce and the clip sound is still cleared even though mute and DIM are both off, try moving the clip to a different take lane. This resolved a handful of cases where the clips simply wouldn't bounce correctly. You may notice when bouncing that some times the clip disappears. It did not actually disappear, the clip just jumped to a different take lane - possibly behind another clip (not confusing at all). About 50% of the time when this happens Sonar crashes. Restart and move the clip to a different take lane and try bouncing again. Also try moving any overlapping clips on different take lanes to a different take lane. Oh and don't try to undo the bouncing of a Melodyne clip that jumped take lanes, this is pretty much guaranteed to lock up Sonar without a crash. If this still doesn't work freeze the track and re-import the frozen audio file to replace the whole track.
Unrelated to above, there is a minor annoyance that Celemony has yet to fix: Previously the plugin would store time-grid settings per project/clip. It resets them now each time the project is closed. I notified Celemony about this a few months ago during our 50+ email exchange.
Good luck to everyone who is having problems.