Hmmm... perhaps now I see something. If the fade is very narrow, then the fade cursor can be activated all the way down the edge of the clip. I have to move the mouse just a bit closer to the edge of the clip to see the slip edit cursor. So I can see how this might become a problem.

Does this problem still happen if the red vertical line indicating the start of the fade is well away from the edge of the clip?

This might be an issue with not having enough horizontal pixels to discriminate between the fade and slip edit lines. I notice you have a 17" screen, so maybe not too many horizontal pixels. I have a widescreen with 1920 pixels.

Cheers, Peter.

Hey Peter,
Thanks for looking into this!!!! Yes, when the Fade in is very close to the beginning of the clip.  I don't think it's a resolution issue, I think it might be (I hate to say it) a bug, because it doesn't happen at the end of clips even if there's a fade out.  For example, let's say there are two clips that overlap a bit and there's a crossfade, I can trim or adjust the fade of the clip whose end (tail) runs into the beginning of the other one, but I have trouble slip editing the beginning of the other clip.  Although, this happens at the beginning of any clip that has a fade in, even if there's no overlapping. 

And this happens even though I can clearly see the fade in on the clip.  So it's not like my waveforms look tiny and I'm zoomed out a lot.  And it's not just the smart tool, it's the trim tool also. Sonar's never done this before.

Confirmed w Tech Support that this is indeed an "issue/bug". Although it took me a while to get them to recognize that it isn't working the way it should. Problem report has been logged.  Workaround is to hold down F8 while using the Smart Tool and it allows you to do the slip edit.  Note that this only happens at the beginning of clips, where there's also a Fade In and you're zoomed out a bit.  It's a pain when you're trying to slip edit clips across multiple tracks at once and want to visually see the edits taking place.

I was testing on fade outs at the end of clips. Now I know it's only at the start of clips, I can reproduce this problem easily.

Just shows how important it is to specify the exact circumstances of a problem. This is where posting a video on youtube works really well (although it's a bit of a pain and takes time to do).

I'm really glad you persevered with this bug. It would surely bite me and many others sometime soon. Hopefully it will now be fixed in X1b. Thanks.

Cheers, Peter.

Agree with all the above. I like to do a lot of vocal editing. It is so bas in X1 that I no longer edit in it and use 8.5.3 instead.
It always worked intuitively before.
Fuming!

Unfortunately, this is still an issue in X2. It makes slip editing clip starts very tedious. The F8 shortcut kinda works, but you lose fine control, as it jumps inside of any fade and then you have to slip it back to the left.  Hope this is on the bug list!
 
P.S. The following video (which was still up as of posting this) clearly demonstrates the problem.  If a clip has a small fade in, you cannot slip edit without zooming in considerably.
http://tinypic.com/player.php?v=24l4kt4&s=7