When I play back a project the Now Time cursor moves twice as fast as it should and continues way off the end of the last clip while the playback is still playing. When I record and playback the sound is reduced in pitch, obviously playing at the wrong speed.

I'm running Sonar Studio 8.5.3 on a PC running Windows Vista Home Basic Service Pack 2 with an Alesis Multimix 8 USB 
Any help gratefully received.

Many thanks.

Sounds like a sample rate mismatch to me.

Sorry but I can't remember where you adjust this in 8.5 or earlier - have a look in Global options as a starting point.

Hi Jonesey, Thanks very much for taking the time to make this suggestion.
I don't think it's a sampling rate problem.
When I record and play back the sound is of much lower pitch.

In addition the options available don't seem to help:

Options | Audio | General allows you to set Sampling Rate for new projects but you cannot change it for the current project. You can change the Sampling Rate when you export but not for playing.

if the pitch is lower than you recorded it then yes, it IS a sampling rate problem.

you cannot change the sampling rate of a current project.  once you've started in that sampling rate, you have to stay with it.

there's only 2 ways to resolve it:
1) export all of your wave files individually and choose the sampling rate you want on export, then import each of them into a new project with the correct sampling rate.
2) change the sampling rate on your soundcard to match your project.