I'm right on the brink of abandoning ship. I've had one of those nights. I use a lot of Waves plugs and Guitar Rig effects chains and both of them have serious problems with Sonar, at least on my machine. Some time ago I had a problem with Sonar resetting these plugs every time I open the project. It went away for a while and now it's just randomly come back, without me changing anything. I've opened a bunch of projects tonight and every single one of them had all of the Waves EQ's screwed with, either completely zeroing out the settings or turning off the bands or changing hi pass filters to band pass filters. Some of the settings I'll never get back and it's basically kicked my mixes back to square one after weeks of work. Same thing with Guitar Rig effects chains....all settings zeroed out. I am so freaking mad right now....this and many other oddities, bugs, corruptions and plain design flaws have just left me too sour to rule out a change to Cubase or something else. I wouldn't have minded so much had the Bakers kept us in the loop regarding bug fixes, update plans etc, but they're not going to bother are they. No amount of protesting on this forum is going to make one of them chime in and say "listen guys, we know there are issues, we're working on it, you should see an update in before the fall" or anything like that. So I think we've gotten the message. 
 
I can't work like this. And it's just a hobby for me at this point! I cannot imagine what it must be like for those of you whose livelihoods depend on it. I opened 6 projects tonight and the mix is ruined in every single one of them. Last night I bought a couple of Waves items in the sale and spent most of the night trying to get Sonar to recognize them.  Anyway, I'm about done. 

Sorry to hear that! :(
 
For what its worth, I use Guitar Rig everyday and have had no issues with it.
 
Sharke, youre a cool guy and I know you dont wanna hear this but.......
 
Have you tried all the normal steps to find out the villain in this? i.e, opened a project in safe mode? Are the waves plugs 32 or 64 bit? etc etc

Man! I'll tell ya what..... I'm close to bailing, myself. I just keep hoping I'll get it all sorted out and that Cakewalk sees fit to fix all the things wrong with a free update.
Right now, I'm too afraid to actually record paying clients with X2a. I gotta revert back to 8.3.2. It's always rock solid, stable for me. X2a truly is the most painful upgrade of Sonar I've personally ever had to deal with. 

I rely heavily on Waves plug-ins, and have similar experiences. Sonar X2 was rock solid for me, as were previous versions. This was prior to using Waves.  I do not rely on my audio work for my income, as I am retired. However, I still do commercial work when I want to, but, I use Pro Tools for this work - and it is rock solid and just works all of the time.
 
I still use Sonar, but, I have to forget about using Waves Plug-ins. My issues with Waves, like yours, is infrequent. But when it fails all work is lost. Otherwise, Sonar X2 is a great DAW, and does have more features than PT.
 
Oh, and I do not mean to imply the Waves issue is caused by Sonar. I have no idea.
 
Edited for clarification.

one thing i learned about using Guitar Rig fx in Sonar, through much toil & struggle, is that time-based Guitar Rig fx acts weird with mono tracks. convert the track to be affected to stereo and that problem goes away

markyzno
Sorry to hear that! :(
 
For what its worth, I use Guitar Rig everyday and have had no issues with it.
 
Sharke, youre a cool guy and I know you dont wanna hear this but.......
 
Have you tried all the normal steps to find out the villain in this? i.e, opened a project in safe mode? Are the waves plugs 32 or 64 bit? etc etc

I don't think opening in safe mode would get to the bottom of it, because that involves opening with no plugs in order to find out which plug is causing the problems, right? I know exactly which ones are causing the problems. The Waves plugs are all 64 bit and I'm using 64 bit Sonar. When I first installed them, I followed the instructions from Waves support to delete the 32 bit Waves Shell so that only the 64 bit ones would appear. 

JSGlen
I rely heavily on Waves plug-ins, and have similar experiences. Sonar X2 was rock solid for me, as were previous versions. This was prior to using Waves.  I do not rely on my audio work for my income, as I am retired. However, I still do commercial work when I want to, but, I use Pro Tools for this work - and it is rock solid and just works all of the time.
 
I still use Sonar, but, I have to forget about using Waves Plug-ins. My issues with Waves, like yours, is infrequent. But when it fails all work is lost. Otherwise, Sonar X2 is a great DAW, and does have more features than PT.
 
Oh, and I do not mean to imply the Waves issue is caused by Sonar. I have no idea.
 
Edited for clarification.

I contacted Waves some time ago regarding the problems with Waves GUI's in Sonar, and they acknowledged the problem and said that they would contact Cakewalk to try an establish whether the problem was with Waves or Sonar. I've never heard anything more since, although the fact that Waves plugs seem to work fine in other DAW's (and I've tried them in Reaper) suggests to me that it's a problem with Sonar. I did find it strange that despite the obvious issues with Waves and Sonar, Cakewalk ran a deal on a Waves bundle recently. 

wetdentist
one thing i learned about using Guitar Rig fx in Sonar, through much toil & struggle, is that time-based Guitar Rig fx acts weird with mono tracks. convert the track to be affected to stereo and that problem goes away

In what way is it acting weird at your end? I haven't noticed any difference with mono tracks or time based effects - my particular problem affects any plug in Guitar Rig on both mono and stereo tracks. I'll have something as simple as an amp and a cab on a track and when I open the project all of the dials are at zero. 

That's interesting sharke. I wonder if it's SOnar doing the reset or Guitar Rig. One would think that a SOnar bug would attempt to reset all plugs on exit, instead of being target specific. I use Waves and Guitar Rig in a few projects and haven't seen this. How might we compare our preference settings?
 
I'll do a bit of digging and report back if I uncover anything. Don't give up. I've drank the other cool aid and it tastes like s*h*i*t*e too.

I can find nothing out of the ordinary in my config. The only thing that may be different, is that I don't use the 64bit double precision engine. Ever since X1 it caused issues so I turned it off and left it that way. I was sure that there was a setting to zero all controllers on exit but I can't find it. I thought maybe that was the culprit. The controllers were still talking to the plugs at shut down and zeroing them.
 
I should note that while checking this out in a project I experienced a SOnar event. A track appeared with data in it. Data that I didn't put there. I opened a take lane to see if that was related, and the data jumped into the take lane. I closed the take lane and the data was gone forever. It's a good thing I like puzzles.