Hi, thanks for the PM, 
Personally I stopped using the Process functions because of weird behavior issues as your describing. One thing I hated was a volume ( gain) would change a mono track to stereo? 
I gave up and found other ways to work once I decided Sonar does not work like Cubase for wave editing. There is lots of other options and you just have to use those.
 
There's no reason to highlight the timeline to apply the fade out option, just drag the triangle back.  

Yep, that's just what I'm going to do from now on, use the triangle, easier access and faster too. So you've had issues with the process menu as well, I'm not surprised. I never had it change a mono track to stereo, but if it's behaving that strangely, I'm surprised they haven't  addressed the issues and patched them by now. I don't have X3 yet, or any X for that matter, so I don't even know if they continued the process menu in the X versions. Thanks again Cactus.

Musikman
...I don't have that pdf user manual...haven't checked the 8.5 dvd yet.

That's where you will find it.