Well when I received the files it comes out to 683 tracks.
They recorded it overseas and now brought up here for mixing and mastering. I've mixed their stuff before and they loved it so they came to me again. Problem is it looks like every take in the recording process became a new track, like maybe Sonars take lanes.
 
It won't even play because there are so many, it just crashes Sonar every time unless I solo some tracks.
There are like 23 tracks of flute alone and each instrument and voice goes on the same way. I have no idea how the song is supposed to sound yet.
 
I don't know what the engineer was thinking or if he was just lazy or didn't know what he was doing.
Lots of duplicates I'm hearing as well, so some tracks need to eliminated.
 
What's the best way to handle this, aside from suck it up and get to work? (Which is probably what i'm going to end up doing anyhow)

Wow. Just...wow.
 
You might suggest they export each track as a file and send to you. Hopefully they have a recent version of PT that can do faster-than-real-time bounces.

Well if you charge by the hour then this is a good bit of work to enjoy. 
 
The big question is why is there no notes about the tracks? certainly the other engineer kept track sheets and notes? 
Possibly these notes are embedded and that only Pro Tools would show them when the "session" is opened in pro tools.. 
It almost sounds like what you would get if you dumped the Sonar audio folder from a busy project with lots of overdubs. Think about that. If I just gave you my audio folder and no CWP file you would have the same mess.
If I was the band I would not want to pay to sort it out and would take it to someone with protools, unless there is no protools project equivalent of our beloved CWP inluded with the files. I'm sure that there is a basic song that would easily play if these where opened in Pro tools. 
 

Yes WOW!!!
I hear what you're saying Cactus. Usually ppl have this stuff cleaned up before they send it to me.
If I had SloTools LE would that help me out ya think?
She said she did have the protools files as well.  Maybe if I had it I could mitigate myself around this kind of business.

I've had that happen as well, not that many files, but Pro Tools will keep every take so if they din't label things shame on them!

OK
Well now i think I'm gonna have to tell her to do exactly as Anderton said, I bumped my playback latency up to 2048 and soloed 1 track and it still crashed Sonar. I can play the files individually in windows media player but not in sonar.

They need to export the the "live or active"  tracks in the session and not just give you the audio folder.  Its an operation they need to perform

Yes that's what I was thinking, You need the pro tools "session" as it was on the last save. 
I had a Pro Tools LE kicking around here that came with my M Audio interface. I believe it had a track count limitation. 
Why don't you post the question on Gear sluts where Pro tools users certainly outnumber the rest! :? 

http://www.gearslutz.com/board/newbie-audio-engineering-production-question-zone/921901-editing-acoustic-guitar.html
 
Speaking of this, check out this thread I posted in, I'm about to find out how many Pro Tools folks are around as I just baited a hook! 
This guy is having trouble with simple copy paste and is told Pro Tools doesn't do the zero crossing trick like Sonar does. 

Assuming you can't get a cleaned up export from the "Pro Tool" who recorded it, you might try something like this:
 
1. Import all the tracks and archive everything.
2. Un-archive one set of related tracks/takes (assuming you can figure out what belongs together ).
3. Select the clips from all but one of the related tracks, and copy-paste special to the un-selected track using the Paste to One Track option (make sure to set the Now time correctly for pasting if not 1:01:000).
4. This will drop each of the pasted tracks into its own lane (I could be wrong, but I don't think there's a way to do this with drag 'n' drop).
5. Show lanes and click the highest numbered take in the track with the comp tool to make that the active take, muting all others.
6. Delete the copied tracks and save the project as a new version in case you need to backtrack at some point.
7. Repeat 2-6 for all the other groups of takes.
8. Have a beer... or two.
9. Start auditioning takes in each track to figure out what's what.