[Solved] Manchester meltdown with Octacapture card

Post Machester I had a handful of projects generating  'audio device not found messages' but most were fine. In trying to resolve this I uninstalled and reinstalled my Octacapture drivers and now Sonar will simply not play anything through the card. The tracks all load and the transport plays, but there is no audio meter activity on any of them. The Octacapture appears in all of the same driver/setting screens in exactly the same configuration it has had for months. There are no competing audio devices and no new physical connections, this is a computer I have used constantly with Cakewalk for nearly a year now. The Wave Profiler shows the typical figures for latency. The Octacapture card itself is fine - Windows Media Player plays through it without issue.  Only poor feeble-minded Sonar can't seem to access it. This kind of thing has been happening through several of their past updates but usually a restart of the software or PC 'fixed' it. 
 
The only thing that has changed is the Manchester update and I'm getting very tired of hearing Cakewalk blame the myriad issues that seem to arise after each update on their users i.e. must be something wrong with your settings. My simple peasant logic says that if it wasn't broke before the update and it's broke now then the update broke it. I've had ongoing annoyances with Sonar that change slightly after each update - ever since Roland got involved, come to think of it -  but this is the first time one of them has rendered me completely unable to work on my stuff.
 
Can anyone comment on whether or not I'd have issues trying some evaluation versions of other DAWs on the same PC as Sonar ? (That is assuming I ever get it to actually work again). And can anyone recommend a particular DAW? I'd settle for less flashy if I had a product that I could actually rely on. I wasted hours of time last night that was supposed to be productive trying to get this to work.
i7 / 3.4 GHz / 4 core / 16 GB RAM / W10 / Octacapture 

Just a shot in the dark, but maybe delete the aud.ini file and restart (so Sonar creates a new one).

The aud.ini deletion did the trick : thank you kindly. I'd seen that referenced before on forums but have never had to do it...sure won't forget it now. Thanks a ton, Jon.