Dan, I agree.
 
Lynn, I will follow that advice, but can you explain why it matters?  That may shed some light on the weird issues I am having.  Thanks.

OK, you guys have been great but something is fishy big time here.
 
Went into the messed up project.  Hit the O key.  ONE TRACK—AND NOT THE SELECTED TRACK—showed a + after volume.  (It was the bass track.)  I selected other tracks and whenever I hit O, the bass track was the only one with the +.  Finally, after selecting several different tracks, hitting O put a + in EVERY track.
 
This doesn't make sense.  I thought OFFSET was global and affected all tracks.  This experience is showing that sometimes it affects one random track, and sometimes affects all.
 
WTF?
 
Thanks.

Was it because the bass had no automation?  I believe tracks without it show the + sign.  I only suggest exiting the offset mode in order to get used to getting out of it when you don't need it.
 
EDIT:  I check the + sign issue on one of my songs that has automation and found that all tracks show the + sign in offset mode.  Therefor, I don't know what the deal is with your project.  My bad.

I had automation on every track.  In the case of bass and drums, it was just a single node at the start of the track to ensure the song started with the right levels.

It now seems that if tracks are in folders, those tracks do NOT show the + when you hit O for offset.  They may or may not be affected by the Offset.  This is going to make it really hard to know for sure that I "un-Offset" everything.  <<Proven to be incorrect.
 
EDIT:  That theory is incorrect.  I took everything out of folders and I am still getting random behavior.  When I hit O, sometimes only one track shows the +; sometimes several tracks show the +.  I have not yet found a scenario in which all tracks show the +.  This means I have no way to know whether or not I have successfully removed any offsets from the tracks.  This is truly a nightmare.

Konrad,
 
You should seriously consider contacting support and forwarding your project for analysis. If something got fubar'd, I think it would be really useful for Cakewalk to have a crack at figuring out what went wrong.
 
Regards,
Dan