Here is an issue i have been scratching my head over ever since i used my very first version of cakewalk many years ago.... Changing banks on an external synth is dubious at best.  Sometimes it works and sometimes not.  I have looked everywhere for a switch inside Sonar 8.5 (as well as all the other versions i have used over the years) and i can NOT figure out why it works on some songs and not on others.  Please help!  This is VERY frustrating.  I have the instrument definitions in place for my synths (yamaha and alesis) but for some reason the patches will change flawlessly but the banks will not.  I use MOTU 828mkII and midi xpress XT as my interface from a 64 bit Win 7 PC with 6G ram. 
Thank you in advance for any assistance you can provide.

Anj
East TN

I haven't seen this behavior myself (also using Yamaha synth and MOTU 828MkII) but I have seen the first MIDI command get dropped when it's positioned right at 00:00:00. 
 
Try manually inserting a patch change event (Insert -> Bank/Patch Change) at some time > 00:00:00. 
 
You could also experiment with the MIDI playback buffer size (options -> global -> MIDI -> "prepare using N ms buffers"), which defaults to 500ms but can be increased to, say, 700ms.
 
 

Thanks for the suggestion Bitflipper but alas i am having no luck with it.  It seems i am doomed to patch selecting out of bank #1 only on all my external synths.  I have been through every conceivable menu on my yamaha synths and even found where there is a switch that says:
Program Change:  YES/NO
Bank Change:  YES/NO
 
To which both are enabled but Sonar (both X2 and 8.5) will only select patches out of bank # PRE 1.  This is sooooooo very frustrating.  I will now experiment with Cubase and see if it does the same thing over there.  I dunno... maybe my midi patch bay is faulty or something but i need to nail this down.

Thanks again

I doubt the DAW is at fault. Since the problem's with two different synths it probably isn't in the synthesizers, either. That leaves the MIDI interface as the most likely suspect. The MIDI Express is a MIDI router, so the first place I'd look is the routing configuration. When MIDI's not working right here, it's almost always because I've got the wrong configuration selected on my MIDI router.

My old Roland MIDI patch bay had a filter that could stop bank changes from passing through.