OK, I finally got down to the studio to try some  things ...
 
Yes, the PA System PC is running SONAR, but that PC doesn't have my arsenal of Wave's Plug-ins, so the template is different. I usually create a new project on the DAW PC and drag/drop the files in, or copy/paste between two projects. 
 
I just now figured out the root cause of my troubles and it's kind of embarrassing, so much so that I almost didn't post a follow up ... I literally had one of my many drives near full and SONAR just didn't deal with it gracefully; that's it. I checked and checked late last night, but I have many hard drives on this DAW, I was tired, and must have had my eyes crossed.  After a full night's sleep it was blatantly obvious what was going on. 
 
Thanks for your help everyone! 

Yes, it did pop up the message about the HD possibly being full <smack upside the head> but it also was spewing messages about invalid file formats and DirectShow problems as well as creating empty clips with no overviews when I did the copy/paste activities. So, after my initial gander at the HD spaces (my epic fail) yielded I was fine in that department I moved on because I thought I recalled that it was one of those kitchen sink errors and didn't always correlate to a HD being full. Anyway, all is well now and I'm happily mixing down my NYE Party gig capture.
 

Given several solutions were offered even though they didn't apply to you, you might want to add [Solved] to the title to help others who have what they think is the same issue.