I'm glad this thread blossomed without turning into some kind of battle. The variety of responses made for an informative aggregate. I can tell a few people here were following me down the path of workflow vs sound quality considerations for the type of work I normally produce. Best of all I was inspired to do more research about how bitbridge and jbridge work and that it's something you set up one time per plugin as opposed to every instance. Also, that it seems like once a plugin is playing nicely it will continue to do so more or less.
I don't look at this forum very often but when I do I see posts about 64 bit problems and I guess I got the impression that it was not totally ready for primetime. I also tried using a 64 bit version of vegas 8 early on and while it was great from some things it was very problematic with others. The later versions are completely usable and I don't even have a 32 bit install of those.
The main factor is that I don't really want to change the way I work all at once. I have to be productive and if I didn't need more processing power I wouldn't change anything. I'm leaving an incredibly stable system behind that was just plain old 32 bit XP that just runs and runs and runs. Unfortunately it just doesn't run fast enough at higher sampling rates so in the name of progress I must move on.
My current plan is to go ahead with my 32 bit setup for my current projects but also start setting up 64 bit X1/X2 installations so I can begin figuring out the plugin management.
Cheers all.