1. No need to lose sleep over any of this - I certainly do not want you to. And, I didn't mean to scare you or anything like that. All I did was list the steps to cleanly remove an installed version of Sonar. I have done this myself many times, over the years, and lots of other folks have too. Nothing to be scared of - the steps are just like a recipe to follow - like you were making cookies.
2. Free will gives us all the freedom to do as we choose. You are only accountable to yourself - I am not disappointed in you - no reason to be. I am not sure why you would think I might be.
3. You could safely remove any particular installed Sonar version, and install it again, without need for doing anything with reloading the entire operating system. If you choose to reload your entire computer, that is certainly your choice, but not required, as far as for anything I had written in earlier posts.
4. IF you do choose to reload your entire computer, Sonar 8.5.3 will install just fine, with whatever version of whatever plugins it has, and even if some are no longer present in X2 or X3, those plugins will still be there because you installed them with 8.5.3 - I hope that makes sense. For example, they replaced V-Vocal with Melodyne in X3. My V-Vocal is still on my system, from an earlier release of Sonar, so it does not get deleted when I install X3. It's just that X3 ships with Melodyne, so BOTH V-Vocal and Melodyne live side by side on my computer. I hope that better explains it.
This is just a suggestion - why not take a good backup, and hold off on reloading your entire operating system for the moment, and just go through the steps to remove the current X2 you have installed now, following the steps I listed earlier?
Then, install X2 again, with Run As Administrator, and see if that fixes your Sonar issues.
You could then decide to either leave the operating system alone, or then choose to move to a solid-state primary drive as a separate issue, separate from Sonar.
Just a suggestion,
Bob Bone