After updating Waves to 9.2r13 from a previous minor revision, Sonar no longer finds the same Waves plug-ins, and I'm left with days and days of retro-fitting all of my previous Sonar .cwp files with updated Waves plug-ins and re-fitting the individually saved Waves plug-ins settings. Why does Sonar hold the previous minor revision signature version hostage like this? Is there a procedure for preventing this?
 
I've reset all plug-ins, re-installed X2(a), and re-scanned. The projects are looking fro the previous minor release of the WavesShell. I can't stress enough how big of an issue this is for me. This has been going on since at least X1 and Waves 9.0. The only fix I found was to re-install the older release version, re-scan/reset all plug-ins, manually save each and every Waves plug-in settings for each project in my Sonar history, uninstall the old version of Waves, install the new, re-scan, replace each Waves plug-in in each Sonar .cwp. then, manually and individually re-import the previously saved settings for each Waves plug-in.
 
If Cakewalk and Waves work closely together, why hasn't this colossal oversight been worked out yet?

Wow that really sucks beyond words. I've been suffering ongoing problems on and off with Waves plugins losing their settings even without any version changes. Not to mention the GUI problems. I like to think that a major DAW manufacturer like Cakewalk would be working together with a major VST manufacturer like Waves in order to make sure the two play nicely, however given how long these problems have existed I don't hold out much hope. 

I know this is more related to the WaveShell.dll version than the individual plug-ins, but it's still a problem. After reverting back to the (Glad I saved the previous full Waves offline installer (version 9r7)), but right now, until there's a fix for this, I'm going to be held to WaveShell.dll.9r7 forever unless I'm willing to manually update every previous and current .cwp project. Someone completely missed the boat on that one (either Waves, Cakewalk, or both). And this was such an easy problem to discover. Was this not tested and considered for X2? I even reported it as a problem in X1 before.
 
Right now, Waves IR-1 is crashing Sonar every time I save and close a project with any changes, if that project includes Waves IR-1.

That's Waves' doing, not Cakewalk's. Plugins are identified internally not by version numbers but by unique identifiers called class IDs, abbreviated CLSIDs. The developer decides if a new version of a DLL will inherit its predecessor's CSLID or get a new one. If it gets a new one, then SONAR has no choice but to consider it as a brand-new object just as if you'd added some unrelated plugin. There are legitimate reasons for giving a new version a new CLSID, but sometimes it's just an oversight/mistake on the part of the programmer.

bitflipper, thanks, and I agree that this is really a Waves issue, but if Cakewalk and Waves claim to work very closely to try and resolve the crashes, and GUI glitches between the two, this was apparently overlooked and self-defeating for both. If Waves believes these should have different CLSID's to fix some issues with Waves plug-ins crashing Sonar, then certainly Cakewalk would allow me some way to "re-select" a plug-in and retain the settings as before than to simply lose the plug-in. This is something they both need to fix.

I opened a ticket online with Cakewalk Saturday morning, but didn't hear back yet. They're probably busy with the Labor Day catching up. I'm genuinely questioning what the best procedure is to update Waves plug-ins in Sonar without a lot of trouble. Surely someone has run into this and found a good way? Thanks!

There isn't a whole lot Cakewalk could do about this. The Plugin Manager doesn't know it's an update to a previous plugin, and even if it did it wouldn't know if the new version is even compatible with the old one. It would be impractical for Cakewalk to keep track of all the third-party plugins, their successive revisions, and backward compatibility issues that even their own developers might not be aware of.
 
You may already know my feelings about Waves, but I'll say it again anyway: they don't care about you, and they are not the only solution out there. Save yourself the aggravation and forget Waves.
 

One would think that waves would maintain backwards compatibility as far as CLSIDS - you really need a good reason to drop previous interfaces - who knows? Most simply keep the existing ones, and create a new ones for new features and updates. This way, old stuff continues to work as before while new features are there for those who want them.
 
Anyway, I really don't like the idea of a master VST shell hosting some pseudo-vst plugins - it's just more stuff to go boom-boom and doesn't add value.

That bit me too, when they dropped DX effects.

Can't go backwards, only forward ...